Using the Marquee Options in Photoshop

If drawing from the center outward or creating a perfect circle or square doesn’t give you enough control, you may want to take a look at the marquee settings provided by the Options bar. These options allow you to make even more precise selections by specifying exact measurements.

You must select the options in the Options bar before you make your selection with the marquee tools.

Here’s the lowdown on each of the remaining options:
-->Feather: Feathering blurs or feathers the edges of a selection. The amount of blur depends on the pixel value that you enter for the radius — the higher the radius, the blurrier the edge. For example, in Figure 1-5 you see that a higher Feather radius means a blurrier edge. The radius measures how far in all directions the feather effect extends. For example, a radius of 4 means that the feather extends 4 pixels to the right, left, up, and down from the selection outline.

You can use feathers to create a subtle and natural transition between selections or to create a special effect where an image slowly fades out to the background or to transparency. If you want to apply a feather as you are selecting, select the Feather option in the Options bar before using the marquee tools. However, if you have already made your selection, you can feather it after the fact by using the Select menu.

-->Anti-aliased: Whereas feathering completely blurs edges, anti-aliasing just slightly softens the edge of an elliptical selection so that very hard, jagged edges aren’t quite so prominent. You don’t have an option for entering a pixel value for anti-aliasing. An anti-aliased edge is always 1 pixel wide. You can use the anti-aliasing option only with the Elliptical Marquee tool. It isn’t available for the other marquee tools because the selections you make with the other tools always have straight edges — there aren’t any jagged edges to soften. I recommend keeping this option selected, especially if you plan to create composite images. Antialiasing helps in creating natural-looking blends between multiple selections.

-->Style: The Style drop-down list contains three settings:
- The Normal setting enables you to freely drag a selection to any desired dimension.
- The Fixed Aspect Ratio option allows you to specify a ratio of width to height in a selection. For example, if you enter 2 for width and 1 for height, you always get a marquee selection that’s twice as wide as it is high, no matter what the size. A selection that’s 4 inches wide is automatically 2 inches high. You aren’t limited to whole numbers, by the way; decimals are acceptable as well. This option is frequently used to create vertically oriented images from horizontal video screen captures and photos taken with digital cameras.
- And finally, select Fixed Size to specify exact values for the Width and Height. This option comes in handy when several images need to be the same exact size, as in a row of headshots of executives in a corporate brochure.

-->Width and Height: When you select a Fixed Size from the Style drop-down list, the Width and Height text boxes are available for you to enter values. Even though the default unit of measurement in the Width and Height text boxes is pixels (px for short), you can enter any unit of measurement that Photoshop recognizes —pixels, inches, centimeters, millimeters, points, picas, or percents. After the number, simply type in the word or abbreviation of your desired unit of measurement. Photoshop even lets you enter mixed units of measurements, so if you want a selection 100 pixels by 1.25 inches, you can do so.

Why would you do this? Who knows, but Photoshop allows you to. You’ll only use this option if a selection must be a certain number of pixels wide, and even though you’re not sure of the exact pixel measurement of the height, you’re guessing that it’s, say, 1.25 inches.

Photoshop CS has a new button (a double-headed arrow icon) between the Width and Height fields. Click this button to swap the values between the Width and the Height.