Inverse selections in Photoshop

Sometimes an inverse selection in Photoshop is very useful to use.  The inverse selection can be used to lock in a portion of an image that you do not want to affect, while letting you alter other areas.

Step 1 : Open any image in photoshop. I have opened the image of this baby girl. You will find it here

It belongs to ~little-stocks Nani

Step 2 : Use the Pen Tool or the Magnetic Lasso to select the baby girl. Or you can use a Layer Mask to make a selection. It is easy. You can see how you can do it here.

Step 3 : The baby has been selected.

Step 4 : Press CTRL+SHIFT+I to inverse the selection.

Step 5 : Click the Add New Fill or Adjustment button and click on Gradient Map.

Step 6 : The Gradient Map appears. This is the default setting.

Step 7 : This is the effect you get immediately. What is happening. The pixels in the girl's figure have been locked in. They are not being affected by the application of the Gradient. The Gradient is being applied to the area surrounding the baby.

Step 8 : Click where the arrow points at right to bring up the Gradient Editor. You can see the Gradient Editor at the left. There are a number of presets available.

Step 9 : Suppose I was to pick the Blue, Red and Yellow Gradient. After clicking you must click OK in the Gradient Editor.

This is the effect I get. Again the baby's image is unaffected.

Step 10 : Change the Blend Mode to Color and lower the Audacity to 40% . It will depend on your image.

This is the effect I get.

Step 11 : I am reducing the Opacity of the layer even further to 20%.

Step 12 : This is how the image looks. Therefore you can see how changing the Opacity changes the effect.

Step 13 : Suppose instead of picking the earlier Gradient I picked the Blue, Yellow, Blue.

Then this is the effect I get.

If I were to click on Violet, Green, Orange

Then this is the effect I get. The other settings of Blend Mode and Opacity remain the same. Therefore you can see what can be done by locking pixels. This is just one example.

Step 14 : I am now going back to Step 4 where I inverse the selection.

Step 15 : Instead of using a Gradient, let us see what a Filter can do. Go to Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur.

Step 16 : The Gaussian Blur dialogue box comes up. I have dragged the Radius slider to 10. Click OK.

This is the effect I get. The baby girl remains in sharp focus, while the background has blurred. You can blur the background even more by increasing the Radius. Similarly by dragging the slider to the left you can decrease the Blur.

Step 17 : Instead of applying Gaussian Blur, you could also choose Radial Blur (or any other filter for that matter), let us see what happens.

Step 18 : When the Radial dialogue box appears I have set the Amount to 40, Blur Method to Zoom and Quality to Best. Click OK.

As soon as click OK you will see a progress bar appear, which means the radial Blur is being applied.

Here is the effect I got. You can try higher or lower Amounts.

This is the effect I have got after lowering the Amount to 20. Therefore you can see how useful it is to work with selections sometimes.

Other photoshop tutorials are here