Select Subject in Adobe Photoshop

Do you still cut out subjects in Photoshop using the quick selection tool? It's time to stop the practice and switch over to advanced methods like Artificial Intelligence. 

In today's vlog, we'll look into an extremely useful feature in Adobe Photoshop named Select Subject. This tool or feature was added to Photoshop in CC 2018, so it is a relatively new feature but it has come a long way in such a short span of time.

Firstly, what is basically Select Subject.

Select Subject is a tool build using Adobe's Extremely powerful machine learning technology named Adobe Sensei. It's solely used to make cutouts faster and simpler. 

Earlier we used to use the quick selection tool to select stuff in Photoshop. But it completely changed with the update of CC 2018. 

First,
let's look at an example.

We have an image here of a subject which is needed to be removed from the background.

First of all, we add a blank layer by clicking on the add layer (+) icon in the layers panel. Then we open the Properties window from the Window drop-down list.

We select the background layer followed by "Remove Background" from the Quick Actions section in the properties tab.

And voila, with just one click your background will be removed almost accurately.

The cutout won't be perfect but good enough to start with.

Another alternatives to this can be found inside the Quick Selection section named "Select Subject" or in the Select Menu named "Subject" or inside Select and Mask named "Select Subject".

All of them have the same technology and work to carry out i.e. to make a marching ants selection of the Subject using Adobe Sensei. All the selections can be refined using the brush tool and Photoshop age-old Select and Mask. (It's new but earlier there was a similar tool named Refine Edge")

The only difference you'll find here is that it will generate a selection and not a mask, though which can be converted to mask just by clicking on the mask button.

The same methods can be applied to non-living objects too.

Few problems you might face with Select Subject.

• The most common problem which you'll face with this is that none of your selections will be perfect. You'll always have to fix the issues manually or using Select and Mask. 
• Secondly, this will sometimes fail to recognize a subject in the image though it will be very prominent. (Will add it here if I find something again).
• Thirdly, it fails to work properly in busy or non-contrasting backgrounds. It actually fails to determine the edge of the subject resulting in useless results, which is quite understandable. In such cases, Pen Tool will always be your best friend. 

Apart from these downsides, Select Subject is an awesome addition to Photoshop CC. Kudos to Adobe to bring such a high-tech feature that works almost accurately in almost all cases. 

 With this we come to the end of this vlog. Below you'll find some useful shortcuts to use along with Select Subject.

• B: To select the brush tool in case you want to add or remove something.
• D: To set the foreground and background to default Black and White colors.
• X: To continuously toggle between the background and foreground color while correcting the layer mask.
• Ctrl/Cmd+Backspace: It fills the selection with the background color. Mostly, black or white in this case.
• Alt/Option+Backspace: It fills the selection with the foreground color. Mostly, black or white in this case.
• Ctrl+2: It shifts the white border focus from the Layer Mask to the actual layer.
• Ctrl+\: It shifts the white border focus from the actual layer to the Layer Mask.

Thank You,

Anurag Sinha