For this tutorial, I shall teach you when the right time to use particular selection tools are to select sections of a particular image for adjustments, either through filters or layer adjustments.
Let's start off with the image I will be working with. This is a picture of me on a grey Juneau afternoon out in Auke Bay.
It's a nice picture, simple really, but let's try to just spice it up and render it into a piece of art, rather than a simple photograph.
First off, we are going to want to select which part of the image I'm going to actually want to alter. Let's subtract me and the beach from the picture. The selection tools you have available are the Lasso, Polygonal, and the Magnetic lasso tool. We also have a shape selection tool with a variety of selections and 'the magic wand', which has two options, the traditional magic wand and the quick selection tool, which I will be using.
The quick selection tool selects similiar areas. You can change the intensity of the selection tool as well as the brush size and sweep over a particular part of an image to select it. It really is the 'quickest selection' tool, as the name implies. As you can see here, I made a quick selection of me and the beach but some parts of the ocean were selected, I'll show you how to remove certain parts right now....
Right next to where you can select your brush size, you'll see the the a regular selection icon with a +/- one preceding it. This is where you can pick to add parts to the selection, or take parts out. I'm going to pick the subtraction one to take away part of the ocean from my image.
You can see now I have subtracted parts of the water from the selection as well as added the rock in the distance to my selection, now I can start adjusting the layers and applying filters in the drop down menus....
Layer adjustments are for adjusting things such as contrast, brightness, and color levels, whereas filters are for applying a variety of 'artistic' effects.
I'm going to first off adjust the contrast a bit because the image is a bit dark where I am. You can see by setting the contrast to -25 the rocks really pop out. Now that you can actually see the rocks, I am going to invert my selection by using the shortcut command Shift+Ctrl+I.I select the Cutout filter and set it to a large amount of rather simple levels, result in the image below. The sky now looks like a watercolor painting. :) I once again invert my selection and apply another filter, this time Paint Daubs to my image and I get a great final image that you could hang up on your wall.
The use of selection tools is key in photoshop because you often only want to use a particular section of an image and often you have to edit the contrast, brightness, or color levels to make it work, which is where adjusting layers comes in. Last but not least, the filters features is important for an infinite amount of uses, from artistic accents to blurring out faces in pictures.
Edit: For fun, here is the image using two different Cutout filters (my favorite) on the top and bottom part of the image. I think this is a much more desirable effect in the long run, but I got my point across nonetheless above...
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