Making Selections in Photoshop

No matter how much you learn about Photoshop, if you can’t make a good selection, your work will look like it belongs with the creatively, but poorly, composed images from one of those weekly tabloid rags. You know what I’m talking about — those pictures that go alongside headlines like “Bat Boy Wins Bake-Off” and “Woman with 16 Fingers Wins Typing Contest.” Those pictures could look better, don’t you think? It seems like some artists intentionally make their composite photos look like they were constructed with a dull pair of scissors and some Elmer’s glue.

Making accurate selections is the key to creating and editing images effectively so that the end result looks flawless. Fortunately, Photoshop offers a bevy of tools and techniques for creating selections, from the simple to the complex. Photoshop offers three basic methods of creating a selection: using a selection tool or method, using the Pen tool, or creating a mask.

No matter which technique you use, creating selections is one of the most important skills you can acquire. Trust me when I say that every minute you spend perfecting your selection techniques will pay off tenfold.

Defining Selections
The tools I discuss in this section require you to take a little piece of a larger image so that you can dig in and make some serious edits. Defining a selection means that you specify which part of the image you want to work with.

Everything within a selection is fair game for manipulation and is considered selected. Everything outside the selection is protected, or unselected. Simple enough, right? Well, you can also have partially selected pixels. Confused yet? A partially selected pixel has usually been anti-aliased, feathered, or masked.

When you use a selection tool to define a selection, a moving dotted outline called a selection marquee appears.