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Dan Rodney/2 min read

Lifestyle Shot: Selecting the Shirt

Common Photoshop Tools

Brush Tool

Paint with custom brushes, opacity, and flow control.

Clone Stamp

Sample one area and paint it elsewhere — perfect for repairs.

Healing Brush

Smarter than clone — blends texture and tone of the source.

Pen Tool

Create precise vector paths for selections or shapes.

Master Photoshop at Noble Desktop

Noble Desktop's Photoshop Bootcamp covers retouching, compositing, color correction, and pro editing.

Explore this comprehensive Photoshop tutorial that delves into techniques such as reusing selections, creating channels, and colorizing using Hue/Saturation, focusing on selection and colorization of a shirt in an image.

Topics Covered in This Photoshop Tutorial:

Loading Selections, Creating Another Channel, Using Hue/Saturation to Colorize the Shirt, Making Rough Selections with the Lasso Tool

Exercise Preview

lifestyle selecting shirt channels

Exercise Overview

In this exercise, we’ll be selecting the shirt. It shares a lot of edges with the skin, so we can reuse the work we did on the skin selection to make the shirt selection easier and faster.

Roughing Out the Selection

  1. If it’s not still open, re-open yourname-lifestyle.psd.

  2. Because the skin selection shares a lot of its edges with the shirt, we can use it to create our shirt selection. As shown below, Lasso lasso tool a quick selection around the shirt (don’t worry about slightly sloppy edges).

    lifestyle select shirt

  3. To subtract the skin channel, go to Select > Load Selection.

  4. Set the following:

    Channel: skin
    Operation: Subtract from Selection

  5. Click OK.

    NOTE: You can also do this with a keystroke. If you hold Cmd–Option (Mac) or CTRL–ALT (Windows) and click on a channel, Photoshop will subtract that channel from the current selection.

Refining the Selection

  1. To save this as a channel so we can refine it, go to the Channels panel and click the Save selection as channel button layer mask button.

  2. Name the new channel shirt.

  3. Get rid of the current selection by pressing Cmd–D (Mac) or CTRL–D (Windows).

  4. Select the shirt channel and show eye hide show icon the composite RGB.

  5. Paint away the unwanted parts where too much was selected.

    Remember that painting with white removes, and painting with black adds.

Colorizing the Shirt

  1. Hide eye hide show icon the shirt channel.

  2. Hold Cmd (Mac) or CTRL (Windows) and click the shirt channel to load it as a selection.

  3. In the Layers panel, add a new Adjustment layer adjustment layer button, choosing Hue/Saturation.

  4. In the Properties panel, check Colorize and play around with the sliders until you get a color you like. If you need a place to start from, try these settings:

    Hue: 36
    Saturation: 35
    Lightness: –25

  5. Save and close the file.