Procreate Tutorial- Selection Tool - Part 8-

What's up everyone and welcome to part eight in the video series about how to get good at using Procreate. And in this video we're going to be talking about the selection tool. Let's check it out. All right so let's dive right into it. So we tap with four fingers to reveal the interface and now we're gonna select a particular layer and let's choose this one. This is the background layer. Now we tap on the selection tool and now we can start drawing on the selected layer with the selection tool. So we tap on free hand and then we just kind of start drawing and you can see this dotted line appears which is indicating the selection that we're making. Now we can pick up the pen, we can zoom into it and we can just continue doing this for the entire selection process. So whatever you're trying to select you can just kind of fine-tune it by zooming into it and try to get the perfect selection. Now another thing that you can do is tapping. So if I tap like this I'm creating a polygonal selection which is basically just a straight line. So you can switch between doing straight lines and the curvy lines very easily. Pretty intuitive process. Now if you find yourself in a position of wanting to undo, like oh I didn't want to do that, simply undo it. Tap with two fingers and continue making the selection. Pretty awesome. Now you can also use these buttons the undo and the redo and this is basically how you go about doing this. You basically draw your selection. Oops made a thingy there and when we're happy with the selection we simply tap on this dot right here on this circle and that closes off the selection. So now we have this area selected. So if we were to draw inside of here we would only draw inside of the selection. Now let's say that you accidentally missed something. There's an area that you want to add to the selection. Now that's very simple. You simply continue selecting by doing this. You make your selection and then finish it off and that just adds to the selection. You can keep on doing this. It doesn't even have to be connected. You can go outside of the selection zone, do something like this. Now we have another selection, another selection and this just adds to the selection. So when you draw you can only draw inside of those areas and if you make a mistake you can always undo. Undoing is two fingers, tap with two fingers, redo, tap with three fingers. But if I just want to deselect a part of this image, so let's say that I don't want this angle here to be this sharp. I want it to be more round and the way to do that is you start by making the selection like so and then instead of closing it by tapping on the dot we're going to tap on minus and that deselects this area. So make sure not to close this selection. Just do the selection like so and then tap on the minus. If you tap on the plus it closes off the area by selecting it. Plus is select, minus is deselect. Now let's say that you want to do the exact opposite of what we have been talking about here. Instead of selecting everything that is inside of this area right here we want to select everything that is not inside the area. So how do we do that? Well there's a very easy way to do this in Procreate and that's this button right here. This is the inverse selection. So if we tap on that we'll select everything that is not inside of this selection. So now if I tap on the brush icon right here and start drawing we can see I'm painting on everything that is not the selection. This can be extremely helpful in a lot of situations. Now there's one thing to note about this. Now that I've started drawing on the selection you see I've lost the controls on the bottom there and the thing is that I can't really go back to the selection. I have the selection active. I can draw on the selection but I've lost the ability to edit it in any way. I can't really make any changes to it. I can't add to it or remove anything. So that's something to be very mindful of when you're doing the selection. Make sure that you've selected everything that you want to select before you start drawing on it. Now Procreate might fix this in the future and I hope they do because this is kind of annoying because you can't really go back to what you were doing. So for now be mindful of this and let's move on to the next one. Now the automatic selection tool is accessed by tapping on this one right here and basically the automatic selection tool allows you to select color ranges. So instead of having to manually select the entire selection with your pen you can say hey this color right here I want everything that is this color and slightly similar color to be selected and you control that by using the threshold and that's done by tapping and then sliding your finger while holding down to the right and left. Left for decreasing the threshold, right to increase. If you increase the threshold you'll select similar colors around it. So if you have the threshold completely to zero you'll just select that exact particular color that you tapped on. If you slide it over you'll select color ranges around it. So it can be very helpful if you're making selections of complicated shapes like this one right here if it is on the same layer. So if it's a single layer that you're working with the automatic selection tool can be very helpful but there's one thing to note. The selection can be kind of coarse meaning that if we zoom into it this area that I painted here when you see it's very pixelated and this can happen with the automatic selection tool it's not what we would call feathered. Now you can try to mitigate this by applying a Gaussian blur on it which might help you but if you're working with a multiple layer image like this one right here we have this these guys over here holding the tree we have them on a separate layer. Now what we could do is we could use the automatic selection tool in order to select them and as you can see it's kind of difficult to select some of the finer areas right here. It's going to take me a long time just to select the things that are on this layer. Now there's a much better way of doing this in Procreate and that's by tapping on the layer like so and tapping on select and that's just going to select all of the contents of this layer all of the colors everything so you can start drawing inside of it and replace all the colors replace everything with what you're drawing so it's a much better way instead of having to go into the automatic selection tool and you know trying to get all this fine little detail over here and another way to do the exact same thing is by using alpha lock and I'll talk about that in this video right here. Now another way to access this select functionality quicker is by tapping and holding with two fingers on the layer and that's just going to select the layer contents just like we would if we tapped on it and pressed select so it's just a quicker way of accessing this functionality. Now notice that I am selecting the contents of a different layer than I have active you see this layer is active but I'm selecting the contents of that layer over here so this is a very powerful thing that you can do you can select the contents of a different layer than you have active this means that we can select the contents of the underlying layer and paint on the top layer so this can be extremely helpful if you want to use one layer as the mask for another layer so let's take for example the guys holding the tree over here so we select that layer by tapping and holding like so and now we're gonna create a new layer and we're gonna paint on that layer with the selection of the underlying layer so let's maybe give this guy some eyes give him a big nice smile over here and you see I'm not able to go outside of the selected area I'm just painting inside of the selection so as you can see this is a very powerful technique and I highly encourage you to take advantage of it it's similar to masking in some ways but masking has another use case for it and I'll make a video on that sometime in the future but there's one thing I don't want to talk about additionally with regards to selecting the contents of layers and that's using it in conjunction with the inverse selection so let's select the contents of this layer right here like we did earlier and now we're gonna tap on the inverse selection so now what we've done is we've selected everything that is not this layer so we can only paint outside of the selection of this layer and as you can see that can be very very beneficial in a lot of circumstances if you want to make a shadow underneath it but you just want to have it on a single layer you can select everything that is not the layer then paint the shadow underneath it a lot of possibilities here and that's why I love Procreate there's just so much that you can do with this program and the final thing I want to talk about is the look of the layer selection so as you can see there are these diagonal lines that run across which indicate what's not selected you can see them better over here now you can customize the look of this if it's getting in your way if it's annoying you you can go into the settings over here click prefs and then slide the selection mask visibility you can turn it all the way up and have it very noticeable or you can take it way down so you won't notice it as much now this is good for me I can see the underlying image and I can see the selection so this works pretty good for me anyways this is the end of the video I'm gonna thank you very much for watching if you like the video leave a thumbs up on it it really helps me out if you want to check out the next video in this series where I'm going to be talking about actions which is the settings basically click on this one right here if you want to check out another video from mine click here if you want to subscribe to the channel click here I want to thank you very much for watching and I'll see you in the next one bye bye