Wish I Had Known This Earlier!

I did something very unexpected today...are you ready for this...I read my Photoshop Elements Manual!!


Yep, I dug it out of the drawer and took my own advice about "Reading The Manual"and I actually learned something~


Here we go:
I'm always applying Layer Masks...and erasing...and selecting...and masking...and blah blah blah...
Today I read up on the Selection Brush Tool which I have NEVER used before!


It's basically another option for painting the areas you want or masking the areas you don't want. 
It's kinda hard to explain...I'll just show ya~


1. I opened my original pic in Photoshop Elements 6 for Mac.

2.  Then I chose my Selection Brush Tool which is here, hiding under the Quick Selection Tool:

3.  What I want to do now is "Mask" the parts of the photo I don't want to manipulate, so I make sure Mask is selected in the options bar:

4.  What I'm going to attempt here is to mask part of the photo then turn the rest of it black & white.

     I'll size my brush to the size I'm wanting and click on the parts I don't want affected (her eyes).

     I duplicated my Background first...make sure to work on the copy layer.  Here's my little alien child    

     with her eyes masked red:

5. Now I'll go to Enhance - Convert to Black and White and choose which B&W option I want.  The idea here is for everything except the masked parts to affected:

Here's what I end up with...my selections weren't perfect, I got some of her hair in them, but this is just to give you an idea of what this tool can be used for.

Now, just because I have nothing else at all to do today, I'll show what the other option for the Selection Brush does:

1.  Open my original pic in PSE:

2.  Choose the Selection mode in the options bar for the Selection Brush:

3.  I duplicate my layer then paint with the brush the parts of the photo I want to Select or manipulate (her sweater):

4.  The sweater has a little bit of a blue tone to it so I'll try to alter the saturation to see if I can get rid of that.  I choose Enhance - Adjust Color - Adjust Hue/Saturation:

5.  Now I'll scale back the Saturation slider and watch the screen until the color looks how I want it to.  In this case I scaled it all the way back:

So here's my final after selecting (so easily!) what I wanted to change then applying the adjustment. If I were doing this "for real" I would have made sure not to desaturate the weeds too, but I was too lazy to deselect them...you get my point!

And because I'm a Before & After freak....here's the B&A!

I am so LUVN this handy dandy little tool I found!  

Why didn't anybody tell me about this earlier?!?!