The Selection Tools In Photoshop

In this article I’ll explain some of the different and powerful selection tools that are available in Photoshop. This guide is aimed at beginners, but can hopefully provide a few extra pointers for more advanced users. Personally I find it very easy to get stuck using only one selection tool, when it can be beneficial to experiment with several in your work.

The Marquee Tools:

The Marquee Tools consist of the Rectangle, Elliptical, Single Row and Single Column selection tools. These are the most basic selection tools in Photoshop. The keyboard shortcut for these tools is the letter ‘M’.

The Rectangle Tool

The Rectangle tool allows you to draw rectangles or squares. Click and drag on your page to draw a square. You can hold the key, ‘Shift’ whilst you are dragging out your cursor which will create a perfectly shaped square. You can also hold the key, ‘Alt’ which will enable you to draw from the centre of the square instead of the corner.

If you’d like to move the square’s position when you are dragging it out, hold down ‘Space’, move the square to your desired position and then release ‘Space’.

The Elliptical Tool

This tool allows you to draw circles & ellipses. Like the Rectangle Tool you are able to hold the keys, ‘Shift, Alt and Space’ to edit the circle when you are drawing it.

The Single Row & Single Column Tools

The Single Row Tool and the Single Column Tool allows you to select a single row of pixels across the image. All you do is click on the image and it will automatically draw a line the length of your document.

The Lasso Tools

The Lasso Tools consist of the Lasso, Polygonal and Magnetic selection tools. The shortcut for these tools is the letter, ‘L’.

Now you can click OK and the marching ants will be around the sky which will enable you do whatever you want with that selected area.

The Pen Tool

The Pen Tool is my favourite tool for selecting areas of a picture. I find it very useful for selecting tricky areas and just generally selecting anything.

If you’d like the picture I am using you can get it here http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1168742

To use the Pen Tool as a selection method all you do is click around the area you want to select, right click and click on the option, ‘Make Selection’.

This box will then show.

You’ll notice that there is an option to set the feather radius amount. The lower the value, the sharper the edges and the higher the value, the softer the edges. Try feathering the selection on the value 1 and then go back and enter 30. After clicking OK in this box I copied and pasted the selection and turned off the original layer. This is how mine looks.

Feathered with the value 1

Feathered with the value 30

Quick Mask

This method is quite useful as it gives you quite a bit of control on what you want to select. The shortcut to enter the Quick Mask mode is, ‘Q’ or you can click here to enter this mode.

When you enter Quick Mask mode the colour palette should change automatically. Black should be the foreground colour and white should be the background colour (if for any some reason it isn’t, press ‘D’ on your keyboard to reset the colours). In this mode you use the Brush Tool to produce a selection area. You will notice that when you start using the Brush Tool with the colour black, it will ‘paint’ the colour red. Don’t worry, this is meant to happen! Painting with this colour adds to the selection. If you swap the colours round by clicking the two small arrows next to the colours and start painting with the colour white, this will erase parts of the mask. You can change the sizes and hardness’ of the brushes in the Quick Mask mode. This enables you to select the edges of area neatly and precisely. To exit the Quick Mask mode press ‘Q’ or click on the Quick Mask button.

After exiting Quick Mask mode you will then have the ‘marching ants’ around the area you didn’t paint red. This enables you to edit this area or invert the selection so you can edit the area you painted red.

Layer Mask

A Layer Mask is a useful, non-destructive way of editing. They allow you to go back and edit the selection you made to a layer. It also saves you from being very annoyed if you erase a certain part of a layer and then decide later on that you want it!

To create a layer mask make a selection of what you would like to keep and click the ‘Add Layer Mask’ button.

Your selected area has been converted into a layer mask. A small thumbnail is now linked to your original layer.

To edit the layer mask click on the layer mask’s thumbnail. Now you can either paint in black or white to edit the layer. Painting in the colour black will mask the pixels in the original layer and painting in the colour white will reveal the pixels in the original layer.

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