Make selections and add masks

Making selections and adding masks are two powerful ways to edit selective areas and add effects to your composites.

A selection isolates one or more parts of your image. By selecting specific areas, you can edit, and apply effects and filters to portions of your document while leaving the deselected areas untouched.

Powered by Adobe Sensei, the Select Subject () tool is trained to identify a variety of objects in an image—people, animals, vehicles, toys, and more, while working with Photoshop on the iPad. Select Subject uses the power of Sensei to analyze a layer, identify the most prominent subjects in your document and make a selection — in a single tap of an icon. 

The Select Subject tool saves time by quickly isolating the main subjects from the background. It gives the best results when your composition is less cluttered, free of reflective surfaces, has a good amount of contrast between the main subject and the background, and has sharp edges around the main subject. You can further refine the automatic selection using other selection tools — Lasso, Quick selection, and Marquee to fine-tune your selection. 

To make a selection using the Select Subject tool, do the following:

1. Double tap or long press Lasso (default) or other active selection tool from the toolbar to bring up more selection tool options.

2. Tap Select Subject (). The Select Subject tool automatically selects the main subject in the active layer of your document.

The Lasso tool is the default selection tool in Photoshop on the iPad and is useful for drawing freeform segments of a selection. Tap  from the toolbar to select the Lasso tool and choose from the tool options that appear. Simply draw a freehand selection on your document to proceed.

The Quick selection tool allows you to quickly paint a selection using an adjustable round brush. As you drag, the selection expands outward and automatically finds and follows defined edges in your document.

Double tap or long press the Lasso tool from the toolbar to bring up the Quick selection tool () . As you tap the Quick selection tool, choose from the tool options that appear:

The marquee tools allow you to select rectangles and ellipses. To make a marquee selection, choose one of the marquee tools and simply drag over the area you wish to select. If you have a physical keyboard connected to your iPad, you can also press M (Shift) to select the Marquee tools.

• Add to selection (): Next selections will be added to the current selection.
• Subtract from selection (): Next selections will be subtracted from the current selection.
• Select the areas that intersect with the current selection (): Select the intersection of current and next selection.
• Lasso settings (): 
  Feather - Select the number of pixels to feather the edges of a selection.
  Style - Select a style from the drop-down list.

Use Refine edge () to further fine-tune the boundary of your selection. Refine edge helps make complex selections such as strands of hair, fur, or other tricky edges of your subject easier. 

To use Refine edge, do the following:

1. Make a selection with any of the selection tools in Photoshop on your iPad.
2. In the active selection properties bar that appears at the bottom of the workspace, tap More () and select Refine edge.
3. In the Refine edge mode that opens, from the tool properties bar, you can adjust the Refine edge brush size, add to selection (), subtract from the selection (), or tap  to open Refine edge brush settings. Under the Refine edge brush settings, you can modify the Hardness, Spacing, Angle, and Roundness sliders per your requirement.
4. In the Refine edge mode,  the properties panel on the right lets you select:
   1. View mode: This setting allows you to choose a view mode depending on the complexity and colors in your composite — Marching ants, Overlay, On black, On white, and Black and white.
   2. Edge detection:  Move the Edge detection radius slider toward the right to soften the edges and toward the left to have sharp selection edges. Enable Smart radius to keep the width of refinement dynamic around your selection boundary. This helps reduce the pixels with no data and makes your selection appear more natural.
   3. Global refinements:
      - Adjust the Smooth slider to smoothen out the uneven edges of your selection.
      - Adjust the Feather slider to blend your selection boundary with the background of your composite.
      - Adjust the Contrast slider to add more clarity to your selection edges.
      - Adjust the Shift Edge slider left to make your selection smaller and right to widen the selection. By default, the value is set to 0.
      - Enable Invert to make your deselected area the new selection.
   4. Output as: You can choose to output your refine edge selection as — Selection, Layer mask, New layer, and New layer with mask. Before you are ready to output your selection, you can enable Decontaminate colors and use the Amount slider to adjust and remove any color fringe present in your selection. This is helpful when your selection is made against a sharp color contrasting background.
5. Tap the undo () icon to revert the last action performed. Tap redo () to restore the undone action.
   
6. Tap Done to apply your Refine edge selection settings. Tap Cancel to exit the Refine edge mode.

You can use masks to hide portions of a layer and reveal portions of the layers below. Masks are nondestructive, which means you can go back and edit the masks again without losing the pixels they hide.

• A layer mask hides part of a layer from view.
• A clipping mask uses the contents of one layer to clip or hide the contents of one or more other layers from view.

You can create a layer mask to show parts of a layer and hide others by turning a selection into a layer mask, or by painting on the layer mask after creating it. In areas where the layer is masked or hidden, the layers below are visible. Masking layers is a valuable compositing technique for combining multiple documents into a single document or for removing unwanted objects from a composite.

You can view the selected area while the rest of the layer gets masked.

From the compact layer view, you can swipe left and right on the layer thumbnail to switch the view from layer view to layer mask view. Both thumbnails are visible on the detailed layer view. To learn more about layer views, see Work with layers.

To learn more about layer masks, see Work with layers.

A clipping mask allows you to use the content of one layer to mask the layers above it. To learn more about clipping masks, see Work with layers.