EDITING - Why I make my own selections in Photoshop

The key part to editing fine art black & white architecture images is being able to selectively apply adjustments to different parts of the image. At the most basic level, this breaks down to foreground, subject and sky. Some images are slightly more complex and might need left and right background selections as well. Also, there are likely to be many, many more selections required on the main subject. The quality of the selections you make will directly impact the quality of your final image, and the time it will take you to prepare the image. In my experience "sloppy" selections end up costing inordinate amounts of time tidying up the image (with clone stamp etc.) and is very prone to errors (e.g. missing imperfections that show on the final print or projected image). Whereas, spending time getting the best possible selections at the beginning of the editing process will save you from lots of rework at the end.


Photoshop (PS) offers some excellent selection/masking tools, as do other similar applications such as Affinity Photo and GIMP, however I don't recommend using them if you are doing the same type of work that I do, the examples shared below will hopefully explain why.

For this article I am going to concentrate on PS, as that is the application that I use day to day.

Let's take this picture as an example - this is the Millennium Forum in Norwich which I am currently editing.

If I choose "Select->Sky" in the menu and create a simple adjustment layer, I can ALT-click (I use a PC, so apologies to Mac users) on the mask for the layer to see it:

In case you are unfamiliar with how masks work in PS, areas in white will be 100% affected by any adjustment, areas in black will not be affected at all whilst areas in grey will be affected, based on how close to white they are. 

If you look closely at the mask, there are areas within the building that are not pure black. This means that any adjustment made to the sky will also bleed into the building. From bitter past experience, these issues can be very difficult to solve if you don't catch them straight away.

Selecting subject can give slightly better results. For this instance, I selected subject and then manually added the foreground area to it and inverted the mask, to only have the sky selected. This is what the mask looks like in this instance:

This gives a better result but there are still issues around the railings at the top LHS and top RHS that need to be fixed. From my experience, fixing issues with this type of mask is more time consuming than just creating your own mask by hand using the manual selection tools (polygonal lasso or pen tool).

This is the equivalent mask that I got after approximately 10 minutes with the pen tool:

I am sure that you will agree that this is a much cleaner and crisper selection, which is in my opinion what is required for this type of image. I plan to talk about the pen tool and using it for selections in a lot more detail in a later article (the pen tool is one of the hardest tools I have had to learn, so warrants a proper explanation).