Hello, this is Rob here from Rob coven.com. And we're showing you lots of ways now to select certain areas from the image. And this is an important part of working with Photoshop. Virtually every time you are working with an image, you'll have to select different parts. Now, on this particular image, I want to select just the sky. There are many ways we can do that.

We can do that with a list so we can do it with a magic wand. We can trace around it with a path, but again, this is looking extremely complicated. Would you want to trace around all of those trees with a path or with a zoo, I mean, that would be virtually impossible. And of course, the magic one selects areas that are of similar colors and that's easy in some places, but is a little bit harder and other places it goes both sides of the horizon. So we're not really selecting just the sky with the magic one tool there. So we're gonna have to do some work manually.

But we want to make it as easy as possible on ourselves. We don't want to waste much time when we could get Photoshop to do the hard work for us. And now there is another way and that's with channels. Here are your channels. As you can see, they are split into red, green and blue. There's the red, there's the green and there's the blue, they look pretty similar.

But if you put the red and the green and the blue together, then you come up with this image. Now what you can do is use a channel. Let's use the blue one. The blue one is usually the best one to use for selections. Let's see if we can use this channel to make our selection before you do anything. You have to copy the layer you want to work on.

The last thing you want to do is edit this Because if you do, then the whole image will change. But what we want to do is to create an extra layer, which is sometimes called an alpha, but it's a copy. So we can always look back on the original and take the copy off and we've got the original image, you'll see when the copy if I put the copy on, it turns it a bit red, red denotes black in the selection, so it's not selected when it's red, and it's selected when it's not red. Now with this copy of the blue channel, I'm just going to try and make the sky completely white, and everything else completely black. And that will be our selection. So I'm going to do that with the curves.

So as I'm have the blue channel selected, and all these other channels unselected. Then all the work I'm doing now is to this blue copy channel. It's not to the image at all. So let's start by making the black bits darker So as you can see there, I've made everything pretty dark in the area that is not the sky. But there are a few anomalies, obviously the sky is getting darker up the top. And there's bits of the landscape that are white.

But I'm going to fill this in now with the brush tool. So I'm going to okay the curves. And now I'm going to get the brush tool and work with a brush with zero hardness. So the edges are completely straight with no blur on them whatsoever. And this is so that we can see what we're doing. So I'm going to get it nice and big, using the square bracket key.

And I'll just fill in all of these highlights here that we don't want. So that was nice and easy. And before you say well, you could do that. Anyway, look at all the line with the trees there. I don't have to cut around that laboriously, but right at the end here, I'll just put a little bit of a blur on the edge of the brush. And I'm just going to do that top bit there.

And there's virtually all that side we've done. Now, of course, we got to make the sky white. So we click on that switch foreground background, or we could just hit X on the keypad, and that makes the brush white because the foreground is now white. So I'm going to make it very much bigger again, and I'm going to just make this guy whites. Now you notice I don't go up to the horizon there because that's too tricky. I'm going to try and correct that with the curves tool again after I finished this bit, but I am going to just come in here and manually do this bit.

Press X on the keyboard again and we're going to black and I'll just follow the horizon. Here I've got the shift key held down. So if I have a long flat bit, I can just do it with one click. A very large brush, but it's got a slightly blurred edge. And as you can see, the top of that church spot is nicely filled with black so we don't have to worry about that bit. And now we're on to the clouds.

So everything black now is the landscape, the land, and everything White is the sky, although there's a little bit of gray here and I'm going to try and eliminate that now with the curves, and I should be able to just push that up there. And there we have it, that is a complete selection of the sky, or everything else but the sky and we've done that in a couple of minutes, whereas if we did it manually, it would have taken ages. So that shows you the great benefits of copying a channel and using it as a selection. I hope you enjoyed that video. In the next video, I'll show you how I can use this practically