Selecting Body Parts in Photoshop with the Object Selection Tool

Steve Caplin

Photoshop’s automatic Object Selection Tool has increased in speed and accuracy with each update, providing artists with a much quicker way to make selections. Now Adobe introduces the ability to select body parts and facial features automatically. This is not yet available in the shipping version of Photoshop but is in the public beta, which you can download through the Creative Cloud app if you have a subscription.

Start with a Person

Start by choosing the Object Selection Tool. If you don’t see it, it’s nested with the Magic Wand Tool, and shares the keyboard shortcut W. It takes a few seconds to interpret the current image, and clicking on the Select People button in the Options bar will bring up a list of features – hair, eyebrows, eyes, pupils, mouth and so on. You can click on any of these to load them as a selection.

Rollover Selection

You can also move the cursor over your image, and each body part will be highlighted with a pink outline. Here, rolling over one of the eyes automatically selects both eyes.

Adjust the Selection

You can use any of the standard adjustment tools, or – better – make a new Adjustment Layer so that the effect can be edited later. When you choose an Adjustment Layer the selection is automatically turned into a Layer Mask, which also allows you to fine-tune it if there are any inaccuracies. Here, I’ve added a Curves adjustment to brighten the whites of the eyes.

Keep Selecting

Each time you mouse over a different body part, it will be highlighted for selection. This allowed me to change the color of the eyes, the saturation of the mouth, the brightness of the teeth, the color of the dress, all without having to make a single manual selection. By selecting the whole body from the Select People button, I was able to invert the selection to change the color of the background.

Multiple People Selection

If there are more than one person in an image, Photoshop will recognize them as different individuals. In a neat extra, it will extract their faces and feature them as buttons in the Select People panel.

It’s Not Just Features

The Object Selection Tool is able to identify and select clothing as well as facial features. Here I was able to make automatic selections of the man’s jacket, tie and shirt, as well as the woman’s jacket and hair. There are separate auto selections for hair and beards, and to add to a selection just hold the Shift key and click on the second one.

Select Everything

Photoshop can determine different items of clothing with ease. Recoloring this man’s shirt, pants, boots, toolbelt and hat, as well as his hair, took just a few minutes thanks to automatic selection.

Far from being a gimmick, the Object Selection Tool is a valuable time-saver that will greatly enhance a designer’s workflow. You can choose whether to have the selections calculated on your device or, for better results, in the cloud – although this does take marginally longer.