All of the Marquee tools—the Rectangular, Elliptical, Single Column, and Single Row Marquee tools—occupy a single slot in the upper-left corner of the Tools panel. To select whichever of the tools is currently “on top,” just click it or press M on your keyboard. To switch from that tool to any other Marquee tool, click and hold the Marquee tool in the Tools panel to bring up the pop-up menu, then choose the tool you want from the menu. If you press Shift+M while any Marquee tool is active, you switch to the Rectangular Marquee; press the same keys again to switch to the Elliptical Marquee.

Now that you know how to access the Elliptical and Rectangular Marquee tools, let’s talk about what you can do with them. To select part of your image with the Rectangular Marquee, click at one of the area’s corners and drag to form a rectangular area. When you release the mouse button, the selection is complete. The Elliptical Marquee tool works the same way as the Rectangular Marquee tool, except that it selects an oval area instead of a rectangular area. No matter which tool you use to create a selection, the area is bounded by a moving dashed line, often referred to as “marching ants.”

To experiment with the Marquee tool’s many uses, first create a new file (go back to Hour 2, “Opening and Saving Files,” if you can’t remember how). Give yourself some room to work; the Photoshop Default Size preset should work well. Then follow these steps:

You can move a selection around the canvas by clicking and dragging it with any of the selection tools active. If you click outside the selection area, that selection disappears; then you can drag to create a new selection. If you want to add more area to an existing selection, press and hold the Shift key before you start dragging. Keep holding the Shift key as you make additional selections. (You’ll see a plus sign beneath the crosshair whenever the Shift key is held down.) Where the selected areas overlap, they merge to form one larger selected shape. Figure 3.2 shows both single marquee shapes and a combination of shapes making a selection that somewhat resembles a city skyline.

Figure 3.2. You can combine square and round selections to make larger, more complex selections.

To select a perfectly square or round area, choose Fixed Ratio from the Style pop-up menu on the Tool Options bar and enter 1 in both the Width and Height fields, or just press the Shift key after you start dragging the shape. Use Fixed Size to make multiple selections that are the same size.

To deselect an area inside another area (making what graphic artists call a knockout), press Option (Mac) or Alt (Windows) as you drag the inner shape. (You’ll see a minus sign appear beneath the crosshair.) For instance, if you have a circle selected and you drag another smaller circle inside it while pressing Option (Mac) or Alt (Windows), the selected shape is a torus (better known as a doughnut).

The thin, horizontal (Single Row) and vertical (Single Column) Marquee tools select a single row of pixels across the entire width or height of the image, either horizontally or vertically. You might find them useful for cleaning up the edges of an object.

Whenever there’s an active selection, you can edit only the area within the confines of the marquee as long as a selection is active. Thus, after you make a selection, you can perform whatever action you want, but before you move on to work on another part of the image, you must turn off, or deselect, the selection by clicking outside the selected area with one of the Marquee tools or by pressing Command-D (Mac) or Ctrl+D (Windows). Until you do this, you can edit only within the selection’s boundaries. You can use a selection to restrict changes such as color shifts to a single area of an image, or even to erase a piece of the picture. When a selection is active, you can remove the active selected piece by pressing the Backspace/Delete key.

As useful as the Marquee tools are, even when you use them to combine multiple selections, sometime you have to select irregular shapes that the Marquee tools just can’t accommodate. Perhaps you might need to select a single flower from a bunch or, as in Figure 3.3, remove the “Basil” tag from the flower bed.

Figure 3.3. Selecting an object with the Lasso requires a significant amount of patience if you want the selection to be precise.

That’s when you should haul out the Lasso tool. You can use it to select an area by drawing along the edges of the space with the tip of the “rope” in the tool’s cursor. Using the Lasso tool to select an object in this way requires a steady hand and good hand-eye coordination, as well as a clean mouse or trackball. As with the Marquee tools, you can add to your Lasso selection by holding the Shift key and dragging to select other parts of the image.

The Polygonal Lasso tool works much the same way as the regular Lasso tool. As its name implies, however, the Polygonal Lasso tool makes irregular straight-edged selections instead of curved ones. It’s actually easier to use than the main Lasso tool when you need to make detailed selections, because you can control it much more easily. Instead of simply dragging to create a selection line, as you do with the regular Lasso, you click the Polygonal Lasso to place points, and Photoshop connects the points with straight lines. You can place as many points as you need, as close together or as far apart as necessary. Figure 3.4 shows the tool in use.

Figure 3.4. The Polygonal Lasso tool works great for selecting this “boat,” which has straight sides and few curves.

The Magnetic Lasso is really fun to use. As you drag it around any shape with a reasonably well-defined edge, the selection snaps right to that edge. Select it and use it just as you did the Polygonal Lasso. Because it finds edges by looking for differences in contrast, the Magnetic Lasso is most effective when you’re selecting irregular objects that stand out from their backgrounds. You can use the Tool Options bar to set several parameters. Width refers to how close to the edge the Magnetic Lasso must be to recognize it (see Figure 3.5). Contrast determines how different the pixels must be in brightness value for the Lasso to recognize them. Frequency determines how often the Lasso sets its anchor points. (Anchor points are the points indicated by boxes on a line. Drag them to adjust the shape of the selection.)

Figure 3.5. Set the Contrast value according to the amount of contrast between the object you’re trying to select and what surrounds it. Here, there’s a decent amount of contrast between the dark chair and the green leaf, so the selection forms easily.

One of the coolest features in Photoshop CS4 is the Quick Selection Tool, guaranteed to make your image-editing life easier. Together with the Magic Wand, this is a different kind of Selection tool than the ones we’ve looked at so far. The Marquee and Lasso tools select pixels based on their positions in the image—you draw a shape, and everything inside that shape is selected. The Quick Selection Tool, on the other hand, selects pixels based on color values. This is often the easiest way of all to select objects that contrast strongly with the areas around them, and it’s also a good way to make sure you’re selecting all of an object so that you can edit it—change its color, blur it, whatever you have in mind.

With the Quick Selection tool, you “paint” a selection by clicking and dragging across an object you want to select. As you drag the cursor across the object, Photoshop selects the pixels you drag across, along with other, nearby pixels of similar colors. Each time you release the mouse button, Photoshop “cleans up” the edges of your selection. You can also click the Refine Edges button to make your own tweaks to the selection.

Cursor size is important when you’re working with the Quick Selection tool. The larger the cursor, the more different-colored pixels it sweeps over as you click and drag, and the more colors are included in the selection. You can change the cursor size as you work; it’s usually best to start with a large-ish cursor to select the bulk of the object you’re targeting, and then switch to a smaller cursor to add bits around the edges (see Figure 3.6).

Figure 3.6. The first swipe across this image with a big brush selects a big chunk of the baby’s yellow shirt.

If you like what the Quick Selection tool does, but you want more control over the selection process, the Magic Wand is for you. Using the Magic Wand tool, you can build a color-based selection one click at a time. The big difference is that you can decide how similar colors must be to be included in the selection, using the Tolerance setting in the Tool Options bar. The lower the Tolerance setting, the less tolerance the Magic Wand has for color differences. Thus, for example, if you set the Tolerance higher (it ranges from 0 to 255), it selects all variations of the color that you initially select. At lower Tolerance settings, the Magic Wand declines to select pixels that aren’t very close to the original color on which you clicked.

As with the previously described tools, the Magic Wand can make and merge selections if you press the Shift key as you click the areas to select.

Settings on the Tool Options bar enable you to specify whether the Magic Wand should select everything in the picture that matches the specified color or select only matching pixels that touch each other. For example, if you have a picture with several yellow flowers and your Tolerance setting is high, clicking with the Magic Wand selects as much and as many of the flowers as the Tolerance setting allows (see Figure 3.7). If you check Contiguous in the Tools Options bar, however, that same click selects only the parts of the flower you click on that are within the tolerance and are right next to each other.

Figure 3.7. Allowing the Magic Wand to select discontiguous pixels can save you a lot of time. Here, I’ve selected all the pink parts of the purse with a single click.

The Magic Wand is most useful for selecting objects that are primarily one color, such as a flower or a brightly colored T-shirt. It’s ideal when you need to select the sky in a landscape. In a few minutes, you’ll see exactly how to do this, but first, you’ve got some other selection tricks to learn.

The commands in the Select, Modify submenu enable you to change your selections in several ways. For example, Border takes the value you specify and creates a selection that many pixels wide around the edges of the previous selection. Smooth is helpful when you’ve made a Lasso selection with a shaky hand or when you’re trying to clean up a Magic Wand selection. This command smoothes out bumps in the Marquee line by as many pixels as you specify. Expand and Contract, as their names suggest, force your selection to grow or shrink by the number of pixels you specify in the dialog box.

The most frequently used command in the Modify submenu, however, is Feather, which enables you to make selections with fuzzy, feathered edges instead of hard ones. It’s helpful when you want to select an object from one picture and paste it into another, because it blurs the edges of the selection slightly so that they blend in better with the selection’s new background. You determine how much feathering is applied to a selection by entering a number of pixels in the Feather Selection dialog box, shown in Figure 3.9. Experiment with feathering selections to find out what works best in different situations. For one thing, you’ll find that a setting that works perfect on an object in a low-resolution image will be way too low for the same object in a high-resolution version of the same image.

Figure 3.9. You determine the amount of feathering applied to a selection in the Feather Selection dialog box.

Having made a selection, you can clean it up with an incredible degree of control and accuracy, using the controls in the Refine Edge dialog box (see Figure 3.10). First, create a selection using any tool or method you prefer. Then either choose Select, Refine Edge or click the Refine Edge button on the Tool Options bar to enter the clean-up phase.

Figure 3.10. This dialog gathers together several powerful tools for making your selection just the way you want it.

The first two sliders in the Refine Edge dialog are Radius and Contrast. Use them to vary the quality of a feathered selection edge, including those created by the Quick selection tool and the Magic Wand. Increase the Radius setting to clean up the selection edge in areas with fine details or gradual transitions, and increase Contrast to make soft selection edges sharper and remove fuzz.

You can use the other three sliders with any selection. Drag the Smooth slider to the right to remove jagged angles along the selection edge and to eliminate 1- or 2-pixel “holdouts” in the middle of a selected area. The Feather slider, of course, works just like the Feather dialog box; increase the setting to blur the selection edge. And the Contract/Expand slider enables you to shrink or enlarge the selection while maintaining its shape; you can use this control to clean up the edges of an object you’re silhouetting.

The buttons across the bottom of the dialog offer you several different Selection Preview options:

Adobe’s Photoshop experts recommend using the Smooth, Feather, and Contract/Expand sliders, in that order, on most selections for best results, and I concur. I’ve always used Smooth and Feather on most selections, and this dialog box makes it easy to apply both of those commands, combine them with others, and see what will happen to your selection before you click OK to finalize your changes.

As you learned earlier in this hour, the Quick Selection tool and the Magic Wand create selections by searching out pixels of similar color and brightness level. To use them, though, you have to know where to click. If you’re working on a complex image, it might be hard to spot all the areas of a particular color. Why not let Photoshop do that job for you? That’s how the Color Range command works.

To get started, choose Select, Color Range. Click in the image window itself, or in the Color Range dialog’s preview area, to choose the first area you want to include in the selection. If you want to select other areas, switch to the dialog’s Add to Sample tool and click those, too. Then drag the Fuzziness slider to increase or reduce the number of colors included in the selection. When you’ve got the selection pretty much the way you want it, click Localized Color Clusters to reduce the likelihood that pixels farther away from where you clicked will be included in the selection. This helps get rid of selected areas in other parts of the image that just happen to match the color you’re selecting but don’t have anything to do with the object you’re selecting. Use the Range slider to determine how much effect the Localized Color Cluster setting has. Now you’ll probably have to use the Add to Sample tool to return some areas to the selection. When you’re happy with the results, click OK.

You’ll see that Color Range selects the chosen colors throughout the image, and it partially selects similar colors (see Figure 3.15).

Figure 3.15. A click in the middle of the blue sky created this selection; the clouds are white, but they reflect the sky’s color, so they’re partially selected.

Transformations are different ways of reshaping objects within a picture, such as scaling, skewing, or rotating. You’ll learn all about how to transform objects in Hour 10, “Using Transformations,” but I want to take a minute here to let you in on a secret: You can transform selections, too.

That’s right—though even some Photoshop power users don’t realize it, you can use a special set of Transform commands to reshape a selection marquee without affecting the pixels within the selection. Why would you want to do this? Well....

Suppose you want to select a manhole cover in a street scene. You know the cover is round, but because it’s parallel with the ground, it’s not round in your picture. You could carefully trace around the cover with the Lasso tool, or you could use the Magic Wand to select it, but that’s likely to be difficult because the cover’s color is similar to the street’s color. The quick and easy answer is to create a round selection using the Elliptical Marquee tool and then choose Select, Transform Selection to reshape the circle into just the right oval.

When you’re ready to give this a try, read about using the Free Transform command in Hour 10. Select Transformation works exactly the same way, only on the selection marquee itself instead of on the selected area.

Suppose that you drop a complex selection and then realize that you forgot to make the slight color adjustment you had in mind for the selected area. No problem—just choose Select, Reselect, and you’re in business again. Now suppose that you drop the selection, spend 20 minutes with the Clone Stamp tool editing out a particularly ugly parked car to one side of the image, and then realize that you forgot to make the color adjustment? At this point, either you bang your head against the wall for a while before sitting down to re-create the selection, or you reload the selection in about half a second because you were foresighted enough to save it.

Whenever you’ve got a selection that you might want to use again—or even if you don’t think you’ll use the selection again, but it took a long time to create—save it before you deselect it. Saved selections don’t take up much space in a file, and it takes only a second to save a selection, so there’s just no reason not to unless you’re determined to keep your file size to a bare minimum. All you have to do is choose Select, Save Selection. In the Save Selection dialog box (see Figure 3.16), choose a document in which to save the selection (normally, the file in which you’re currently working), give the selection a name, and click OK. That’s all there is to it!

Figure 3.16. Saving the selection will ensure that I don’t ever have to re-create it.

If you need to reselect the same area, just choose Select, Load Selection and choose the name of your saved selection from the Channel pop-up menu. You have several choices for what to do with the selection (see Figure 3.17). You can invert it so that everything but the formerly selected area is now selected. Or you can make it a new selection by itself, add it to an existing selection, subtract its area from an existing selection, or combine it with an existing selection so that only the overlapping area of the two is selected. Click OK, and the selection comes right back to life, in either its original form or one of these modified forms.

Figure 3.17. If I load the inverse of this saved selection, the image’s background will be selected but not the rose.

When you save a selection, Photoshop turns it into a grayscale image and stores it alongside your picture’s color channels in what’s called an alpha channel. Some programs can use alpha channels to control the image’s transparency; for example, if you make a selection that includes only the central figure in a photo and excludes the background, you can create an alpha channel from it that would hide the background, silhouetting the image, if you used the picture in an InDesign document.

You can control channels, both color and alpha, using the Channels panel (see Figure 3.18). The first two buttons at the bottom of the panel enable you to load a selected channel as a selection or convert an existing selection into a new alpha channel, or you can Command-click (Mac) or Ctrl-click (Windows) a channel in the list to load it as a selection. Adding modifier keys when you Command-click or Ctrl-click enables you to add the channel to an existing selection (press Shift), subtract it from an existing selection (press Option/Alt), or select the intersection between it and an existing selection (press Shift and Option/Alt).

Figure 3.18. The quickest way to save a selection is to click this button in the Channels panel.

Most pictures can be improved by careful cropping. Try this experiment: Scan or shoot a quick shot of your pet, child, or other favorite thing. Be sure to leave plenty of room around the photo’s subject. Make two copies of the image file, then open all three in Photoshop. Crop the picture three different ways, placing the subject in the center, off to the side, and near the bottom of the image. See how different the three pictures look now? Which is your favorite? Why?