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Selection does not isolate portion of image?


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Tyrannax

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I am new to photoshop and have been reading and watching videos like a madman, trying to figure out this long-feared software. Well, I purchased Matt Kohr's Rendering Basics videos, but am having trouble isolating the subject of the videos. In this case, it is a vase. I managed to save a selection surrounding only the vase after quite a bit of trouble and outside research. Well, feeling confident, the selection lines buzzing around my vase, I started to paint (wildly outside of the lines I might add. After all, the vase was in a closed selection!). It turns out, the paint cut right through the selection and elsewhere on to the canvas. At this point, I have no idea how to isolate the vase so I can paint confident strokes. I thought the selection would do the trick, but despite it covering my subject, paint still covers the entire canvas!

Any help would be great guys. I can tell this forum is going to be a great help.
 
Hi there.... your post was marked as moderated and saw this just now....

A screenshot would help to see what's wrong.

and if possible a sreengrab from the video showing the step as the presenter starts painting on the selection....


It's not suppose to work that way unless there's something you missed on the video or something you didnt realise was on in your tools.
 
I'm not certain that I understand correctly but...If you make a selection and paint, the paint will go inside the selection. If you want the reverse of that, you need to invert the selection. In other words if you want the paint everywhere except the vase, you would invert the selection of the vase: Select-Inverse.
 
Untitled.png Thanks for the replies, guys. This is what's happening. As you can see, the selection certainly surrounds the vase, but it does not prevent paint from touching the surrounding area.
 
Take a screen shot of your layers panel only with all layers showing.
 
Based on the screen shot, it appears that the selection is active as it has the marching ants. The layer, as well as the brush mode are both set to normal, so there's really no apparent reason for this to be happening.

Clare, activating a layer is simple, you just click in the body of the layer and it turns the gray color. This is now the active layer.....not to be confused with turning a layer on or off with the EYE icon. I often call activating a layer "Highlighting", but activating is the correct term. I know how to activate a path to turn it into a selection, but how does one activate a selection?
 
Are those ants really marching though?

As the file is using 16bits/channel, which is unnecessary really - 8bits is ample , it may be that PS has simply ran out of memory, the ants have 'downed tools' and everything has come to a standstill.

The screen shot doesn't really tell the full story but that's my guess.

Regards.
MrTom.
 
Let me know if this could be the reason:

I managed to get the selection to work properly and think the reason for this has to do with how I went about making the selection. Originally, I painted in the vase with black and used Select>Color Range to find the border. This is what resulted in a surrounding selection as you can see in the image. Regardless, this did not work. I then destroyed the layer and instead painted the surrounding area black, rather than the vase itself. This "new" selection, which looked the same, actually worked. Was this because I left the vase itself uncolored and chose to black out the surrounding area?

Also, what is the easier way of isolating this object? Or is this color idea a good one?
 
Okay.... you used the Color Range to make the selection.

That's what caused it. Color Range selected every pixel within the shade that corresponds to what you selected with the picker. Although the selection is not visible, not only did it create a selection around the vase, it picked up other matching shades within the rest of the image.

Painted with solid black which you selected and most probably had a high setting in the fuzziness slider will result in the selection of the darker pixels only.....



edit... actually it's not shade... there's another term for it.... brainfart moment.....
 
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