Making Selections in Photoshop Making Selections You can use any of the four selection tools in the tool palette. By selecting the rectangle or oval marquee tools in the top of the palette, you can click and drag a marquee over the area of the image you want to manipulate. The lasso tool allows you to click and drag a lasso around the area you want to work on. The magic wand tool operates differently. You would click on a region and Photoshop would automatically select a region related to the color you chose. Changing the Selection A selection area can be added to or subtracted from at any time. To add to a selection area, choose one of the four selection tools from the tool palette and while holding the shift key, select a new region. The newly selected area will be added to the total selection. To subtract from a selection, choose a selection tool and while holding the command key, select the area you want to remove. The new selection will reflect the action. How to Make a Perfectly Square or Round Selection Photoshop uses the fairly standard Macintosh method of constraining a selection. By holding the shift key while dragging, the horizontal and vertical proportions should be maintained for both the rectangular and round marquee tools. It may take a bit of practice to learn how Photoshop differentiates between constraining and adding to a selection. Using the Magic Wand Tool The magic wand tool is one of the most useful selection tools in Photoshop. To alter the range of pixels the magic wand will select, hold down the option key while clicking on the tool in the tool palette. A dialog box should appear containing two items: tolerance and anti-alias. The tolerance value controls the breadth of pixels the tool will select. A low value indicates a smaller range of pixels Photoshop will select; a larger value will widen the range. For example, if you wanted to selected just those pixels that were closest to the color you click on, you would set the value low, let's say 10. The anti-alias checkbox allows you to automatically soften the edge of the selection area so that the selection border is not clearly defined. Unchecking the box will leave a defined hard edge around the selection area (provided you make any changes to the contents of the selection area). Selecting a Complex Portion of a Large Image Sometimes it is easier to select the areas you don't want rather than the ones you want. Once you have selected the area you do not want to alter, simply choose Inverse from the Select menu. The area selected will deselect and the initially deselected area will select. You can now manipulate the region at will. Selecting More Than One Area at a Time To work on a region that is not part of the original selection (ie. an area that cannot be physically connected to the main selection), simply depress the control and shift keys while selecting the additional region. In doing so, the new region will be added to the main selection without the need for the selection areas to be joined in any manner. Returning tothe Unaltered Image Without Reverting To Saved Whenever you are planning to do a large amount of image alteration to a specific region, it is best to convert the selected region into a floated area. To float a selection, choose Float from the Select menu. The region will be copied from the image onto a layer above. This floating layer allows you to perform image manipulation without affecting the actual picture. Once you have finished your work and want to anchor it to the main picture, choose None from the Select menu. The area will replace the image information directly below it. If for some reason you do not want to anchor your work to the main picture, simply depress the delete key and the floating region will disappear without affecting the image below.