Selections Basics

In this lesson I'll show you some basics about selections. Selections are a very important skill to learn in
Photoshop, as once you have a selection then effectively you have 'isolated' the chosen area for the process
that you desire to perform on it & this can be nearly any process - colouring, blurring, deleting, sharpening etc. etc.

Here is the original photo of Louise & her father Alan.

Using basic selection techniques I'll show you how to apply a soft vignette effect to this.

This process has many uses in digital manipulation, I'll tell you about them later on!

For now, let's get started...

On the tool bar locate the Marquee tool. If it is not the elliptical shape show below, then you can either ...

1. Click on the Marquee tool and wait for the 'flyout'

2. Use the keyboard Shift+M, until you get the desired tool

Once again you have different methods of achieving the same goal.

At the top of the workspace you'll see the current tool's options. If you look at the Feather option it may be set to 0px (or any other value!).
Now use the keyboard as follows ... Return ... type 15... Return. The value should now be 15px. With a Feather value of 15px, what will happen is that the selection will not have a sharp edge. Instead you'll get a nice gradual gradient effect.

As I mentioned above this has many uses, for example ...

- adding images on top of the original 'smoothly'
- hiding the 'join' when stitching together a panorama montage

With the elliptical Marquee tool selected and a Feather of 15px applied to it, click and drag an ellipse as shown here.

It will take you several attempts to get the desired shape and to get it in the correct position too!

Here's a few pointers ...

After drawing the shape, place the cursor inside the ellipse The cursor now looks like a small arrow head in combination with a tiny 'selection'. Now you can drag the selection area to where you want it to be.

To redraw the ellipse simply click anywhere and the current selection disappears, then you can re-try.

Holding down the shift key makes you a perfect circle shape.

Apart from manually altering the selection, you can use the various options available in the menus...

Look in the Selections, and have a play with the various items

Look carefully at this picture and see if you can spot the difference from the one above. Yes? No?

What I have done is to invert the selection using the keyboard combination CTRL+SHIFT+I.

So now the centre ellipse shape is NOT selected.

Look at the outside edges and you'll spot the 'new' selection.

By using the Marquee tool (Square & Circle) or the Lasso tool (next one down on the toolbar) you can create quite complicated selections and, if required, very quickly invert them using the CTRL+SHIFT+I keyboard shortcut.

Also note that the various 'selection' tools i.e. Marquee/Lasso have options on their respective options bars. These options were briefly covered in this lesson.

Ok we are nearly finished here, there is only on more thing to do ...

On the keyboard hit the backspace key ....

That's more like it!

Remember, you can use this on any shaped selection, and also alter the amount of the feathering applied.

Hope you had fun with this lesson.

Any questions? Email me!

Next lesson - Buttons or labels