When we have a picture with high color richness and we want to work on it, selecting determined areas tends to get difficult, forcing us to make a lot of vector masks, feather selections and working our image with a lot of zoom in. Thanks to color range, we can select specific areas based on color tones, which is a great way of selecting only certain elements of a picture that we want to work with, after reading this post you will understand how to make a good use of this tool and increase your design times.

This tool works better on colorful pictures, using it on grayscale artworks or duotone images is not as effective as with images with more color richness, on this case we chose a colorful Japanese food picture.

After opening your picture, go to Select>color range and the panel will pop up.

Let’s see how the color range panel is distributed.

1. Select which color you want to choose or if you want to manually pick the color.

2. Enable localized color clusters to make contiguous selections.

3. This is similar to the feather for the color range selections, it determines how sensitive the selector is.

4. Switch between seeing a preview of the selection or the original image.

5. Adds or subtracts a new selection to the current choice.

6. Invert the selection.

7. Decide the way you want to preview your color selection.

That’s how the color range panel works, now let’s see some examples of selections made through the color range selection.

And that’s it, now you can make much easier color selections without having to trace complex paths to surround the different areas of a picture, this trick will definitely help you improve your editing times, so let us know what you think and which other methods do you use for making selections in Photoshop, see you on our next daily tip.