Cutting Edge

In the last post I showed the final basic design idea for the case, in this post I'll go over the different ways I cut out each of the images in the design from their original.

Cutting out Han Solo

 This is the original image the Han in the design was taken from. 

The tool I used to cut just Han out was the Quick Selection Tool

   With this tool selected you click and drag over the object in the image you want to specifically select. This tool works by sampling the pixels around where you are clicking and determining their colour. It will then select all of the adjacent pixels which fall under his colour band, the size of the brush can be altered so you can sample more or less of an area at once. 

Here we can see only some of him has been selected, as well as how the selection area follows clear colour edges. 

Here he is fully selected, but we have the spaces between his arms and his hand selected, the easiest way to get rid of them is to use the Magic Wand Tool.

With the Magic Wand Tool selected go over the area you want to unselect, hold alt and click. The Magic Wand Tool works similar to the Quick Select Tool, but instead of needing to be dragged along for it to realize what you want to select this will instantly select it. I didn't use this to select Han overall as I'd have to click each different coloured area individually which is tedious. You can alter the "tolerance" of the Magic Wand Tool so it will select a wider range of colours from the starting one you click on. If you ant to add a selection to an existing one you need to hold shift, otherwise it starts a new selection.

Cutting out the Planet

To cut out the planet used in the design, I used the Elliptical Marquee Tool.

This allows me to select an area by clicking an dragging, and it creates a rounded selection area. If I hold down shift while doing this it makes a perfect circle. 

This shows the planet with the circle selection made, this was then cut.