Painting Inside The Lines

I'm going to undo the paint strokes I added to the image by pressing Ctrl+Z (Win) / Command+Z (Mac), and this time, I'll select the apple first before painting over it. As I mentioned at the beginning of this tutorial, we'll save the details of how to actually make selections for other tutorials. For now, I'll simply go ahead and draw a selection around the apple. Photoshop displays selection outlines for us as a series of animated dashed lines, or what many people call "marching ants". Obviously, we can't see them "marching" in the screenshot, but we can at least see the selection outline that now appears around the apple:

Of course, to us, it looks like I've selected the apple, but keep in mind that as far as Photoshop is concerned, all I've done is selected some of the pixels in the image. They just happen to be the pixels that make up what you and I see as an apple. The pixels that fall within the boundaries of the selection outline are now selected, which means that they can be affected by whatever edits I make next, while the remaining pixels outside of the selection outline are not selected and won't be affected by anything I do.

Let's see what happens now when I try painting over the apple again. I'll grab the Brush Tool just like I did before, and with green still as my Foreground color, I'll try painting over the apple. The only difference this time is that I selected the apple first:

Thanks to the selection I made before painting, Photoshop allowed me to paint only inside my selected area. Even though I moved the brush well outside the boundaries of the selection as I was painting and made no attempt to stay inside the lines, none of the pixels outside of the selection outline were affected. They remained safe and unharmed no matter how sloppy I was with the brush, and I was able to easily paint over the apple without worrying about the rest of the image, all thanks to my selection!

Of course, just because we've selected a certain area of pixels doesn't mean we necessarily have to edit every pixel inside the selection outline. I'm going to once again remove my green paint strokes by pressing Ctrl+Z (Win) / Command+Z (Mac) to undo the last step, and this time, with my selection still active, I'm going to use a much larger brush with soft edges to paint only along the bottom half of the apple, giving me a nice transition in the middle between the green brush color and the natural red of the apple. Even though the pixels in the top half of the apple are part of the selection I made, they remain unchanged because I chose not to paint over them. Photoshop doesn't actually care if we do anything with the pixels we've selected. All it cares about is that we don't get to touch the pixels we didn't select:

Just as before, my paint stroke is confined to the pixels inside of the selection outline, even though I moved well outside of it with my brush. To make things look a bit more realistic, I'm going to blend the green color in with the apple using one of Photoshop's blend modes. I'll go up to the Edit menu at the top of the screen and choose the Fade Brush Tool option:

This brings up Photoshop's Fade dialog box, which allows us to make some adjustments to the previous edit. To blend the green in with the apple, I'm going to change the blend mode of the brush to Color, and to lower the intensity of the green, I'll lower the Opacity option down to around 80%:

I'll click OK to exit out of the Fade dialog box, and to temporarily hide the selection outline around the apple so we can more easily judge the results, I'll press Ctrl+H (Win) / Command+H (Mac). Thanks to the adjustments I made with the Fade command, we now have an apple that could still use a bit more time on the tree before picking:

Up next, we'll look at another important reason for making selections - working with layers!

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