Channel Selections

In this tutorial we're going to be selecting a part of an image using the channels panel. We'll be using prior knowledge of photoshop at this point such as basic image retouching, selection tools, and other assorted basic skills.

Click here to download sample .psd file!

Note: You will need 7-zip freeware, Winrar, or Winzip to unpack this .7z file

(click me for high-res copy)

Photo taken by me, please e-mail me here if you wish to use for anything other than personal use

Step 1

First this we need to do is clean up our image. We can help our channel selection by adding contrast to our image while making it look good! First, copy the background layer because we never ever want to work on the locked layer known as the background. There are many ways to create contrast in an image so we'll begin by pressing command/control+U or by going to the fill/adjustment layer and selecting Hue & Saturation. Bump the saturation up between 15-35% and the lightness between -5 and +5.

Step 2

We can further increase the contrast of the image by changing the fill of the "background copy" layer to a 50% fill and then a blending mode of Soft Light.

That should do just fine and we're ready to move onto our channels layers!!

Step 3

So we have our image here:

and it is nice and colorful and it looks nice and all that jazz but what if we wanted to select the flower and only the flower? What if you wanted to select everything but the flower? There are multiple ways to select the flower by using the wand, lasso, and/or the marquee tools; however, probably the simplest way or selecting this flower is by using the contrast that RGB (Red, Green, and Blue) gives us within this image itself!

Step 4

Now we want to proceed to the channels panel within the layers panel.

So as we can see, there is an RGB layer that has Red, Green, and Blue that make up all real colors of the image. Then each color (Red, Green, and Blue) is desaturated and replaced with that specific filter whether it is Red, Green, or Blue - red, green, and blue?! Just by looking at the layers, we can see that Red has a high contrast ratio between the background and foreground layers, then green is pretty balanced, and the blue is the least contrasting of them all. If you want to get a good look at each color, then turn off the eyes on the sides of the channels and leave all but the red channel highlighted and on like the image on the far right. To load our selection command/control the red channel. Note: You'll want to use the magic wand tool for this because if you load then entire selection for the red, the end result will be anything that you want.

So as we can see, if we were to load our selection of the Red channel alone, you'll notice that we already have most of the flower selected with a few extra things that we don't need and a few things we do need selected that aren't already. Unfortunately, if we use this technique, photoshop will select everything that has traces of red (the very white areas) even if we manually deselect them. So we want to grab the magic wand tool by pressing "W" on the keyboard. and then we want to click inside of the flower and the result will look like the image on the right above us. We want more of the flower added so we can add selections by holding shift or we can take away selections by holding option/alt on the keyboard.

Step 5

With our flower being perfectly cut out, we want to click on the RGB channel to open up all of the colors again and we want
to make sure that all channels
are highlighted like so:

Next, we want to go back to our layers panel and we want to click on any solid layer so either the background or background copy layers and we want to highlight that layer (make it blue! The flower is still selected right? If not, the repeat step 3 and 4 or you can command/control+option/alt+Z to take multiple steps backward until the image is selected again). So like the image on the right!

We have our selection and we can grab our marquee tool, magic wand tool, or any other tool that allows us to select parts of an image and right click and click copy to layer or we can press command/control+J to copy our selection onto a new layer. The result should look like the image on the right.

Step 6

If we want to use this flower elsewhere and/or you wish to see the final result, then turn off the little "eyes" by the image as we did with the channels and you'll see that you get just a blank flower and that's it!

(Click me for high-res jpg)

Note: When you save the image as a jpg, all blank space will automatically be converted into white space. If you wish to by pass this, then click here for the .png where you are welcome to use this flower!