You Suck at Photoshop - Paths and Masks

DONNIE: My name's Donnie, and you suck at Photoshop, and
when are your going to get better?
Let's just, I guess, just strap on your stupid, and
let's get at it.
This time, we're going to do, we're going to advance this
lesson a little bit and stop doing some of the baby things
we've been doing and do some big boy Photoshop work, and
that means we're going to use some heavy duty tools.
And this time we're getting an, a photo
ready to go up on--
on eBay and so we want to add a nice background into, uh,
the object.
And this is the object I've, or the background I've chosen,
to, you know, create a spirit or mood for the piece that
we're using, and in this case it's a wedding band that I
won't be using anymore that we're going to sell up on--
on eBay.
So let's open that up and, you know, copy paste it in here.
Now, there's a lot of things we could do.
We could clean this ring up, clean off some of the dirty
shame and unfulfilled dreams, but I think all we really need
to do is concentrate on getting the background out.
Now--
uh, I saw what you-- you did.
You went, you went for the, the eraser tool and were going
to erase the background off.
Don't ever use that again.
We're going to do this the right way, which means we're
going to use this, we'll use the path tool.
That's this tab over here that you've never clicked on.
And we're going to draw some paths, because you've only
been using about $75 worth of Photoshop and this is going to
open you up to at least, like, $250 worth.
So let's click the Create a New Path button over here,
create a new path, get your Pen tool, and all we're going
to do, it's very simple, we're gonna--
we're gonna select--
we're gonna click a point and make a path.
You click a point, drag, bezier curve, and you keep the
path going.
You see how easy this is?
It's just like what everybody does from the day they're
born, just making a path.
You, you're plotting some points.
If you get a point off, you can Command click and drag it
into place and then keep, keep drawing your points.
You have points on a path.
You know, everybody makes decisions in their life, and
just points on a path.
For you, maybe this path is that you're going to turn over
a new leaf, and you're going to learn some new tools,
whereas maybe my new path is that we're going to make
another path for the inside of the ring.
You know, maybe my path is that I'm going to deal with
the fact that some of my tools don't work.
And maybe one of my problems is that my, one of my most
important tools doesn't work, and that maybe that tool is
supposed to make baby-making man batter, and mine just
doesn't, whereas maybe she decided she needed to go find
somebody who has baby-making man gravy and lots of it.
Alright, we've got both of our paths now.
[RINGING NOISE]
Hold on a second.
Hey.
MALE SPEAKER: Log on, man.
Log on.
DONNIE: I've got to start it--
MALE SPEAKER: Hold on.
We're all going to roll need on the
Legplates of the Tiger--
DONNIE: I've got to start an auction.
MALE SPEAKER: In Orgrimmar?
DONNIE: No, in the fuck--
in the real world.
MALE SPEAKER: OK, man, but, you know, we're
not going to wait--
DONNIE: I'll call you back.

OK, so now we've got our paths, so what we want to do
now is make a selection out of our paths.
So we're going to go back to the first path, right click,
make selection, and then we're going to go right click on the
second path, make selection, except this time we're going
to subtract from selection, because it's in the middle.
And now we've got our selection, we can go over to
our layers, and this is the cool trick--
go down here to the bottom and click Add Layer Mask, and
guess what?
You just got rid of the background, but it's, you
didn't have to use your eraser tool.
And now, heh, we've got this awesome
background, and I just--
let's just export this to a .jpeg and get
it up to, um, eBay.

Just get this up to eBay where hopefully we can get rid of it
once and for all.
Um, so we're going to just upload the photo--
oh, god, this feels really liberating like a big sack of
hurt has been drained.
OK, so now we can just go down here, save in preview, and
list the item, and that's it.
It's, oh, my god, it's up there.
I, I gotta, I don't know that, um--
MALE SPEAKER: Come on, man, we're waiting.
DONNIE: Hey, hey, yeah, listen, how do you cancel, how
do you cancel an auction--
MALE SPEAKER: The ring?
DONNIE: No, listen to me.
How do you cancel an auction in eBay?
MALE SPEAKER: Uh, this a real auction?
No, man, no, you gotta, you gotta get rid
of that ring, man.
DONNIE: No, I made a terrible mistake.
How do I cancel it, I want to cancel it.
MALE SPEAKER: Sell the ring!
DONNIE: I want to cancel it!
MALE SPEAKER: Sell the ring!
DONNIE: Aaaagh!