Using the Select Menu in Photoshop

Although you can add, subtract, and intersect selections with the Shift and Alt (Option on the Mac) keys and the selection option buttons in the Options bar, you can do much more with the commands found on the Select menu, shown in Figure 3-6. Here you’ll find ways to expand, contract, smooth, fuzz, and turn your selection inside out. You can also use this menu to automatically select similar colors and create selection borders. And I show you how to do this in the next few sections. With this kind of knowledge, imperfect selections will soon be a thing of the past.

Deleting a straight-sided selection

If you have an existing selection, pressing Alt (Option on the Mac) with the Lasso tool subtracts from the selection. If you want to subtract a straight-sided selection from an existing selection, you can press Alt (Option on the Mac) and begin to drag. Then quickly release Alt (Option on the Mac) and then select the Polygon Lasso tool.

But this can be tricky and is really unnecessary. I recommend just grabbing the Polygon Lasso tool itself to delete your straight-sided selection. Ditto for adding and getting intersections with straightsided selections.


Selecting All or Nothing
The Select All and Deselect commands are pretty self-explanatory. To select everything in your image, choose Select➪All. To deselect everything, choose Select➪Deselect. The key commands Ctrl+A (Ô+A on the Mac) and Ctrl+D (Ô+D on the Mac), respectively, come in very handy and are easy to remember.

In most cases, you don’t have to select everything in your image. If you don’t have an active selection marquee, Photoshop naturally assumes that whatever command you execute should be applied to the entire image.

Reselecting a selection
If you have taken 20 minutes to carefully lasso a spiny sea anemone from its ocean home, the last thing you want to have happen is to lose your coveted selection marquee. But that is exactly what happens if you accidentally click on the canvas when you have an active selection tool in hand. The selection marquee disappears.

Sure, you can choose Edit➪Undo if you catch your mistake right away. And technically, you could access the History palette to recover your selection. A much easier solution is to choose Select➪Reselect. This command retrieves your last selection.

Besides immediately bringing back a selection you accidentally deselected, the Reselect command can come in handy if you decide to select an element again for a second time. For example, if you do such a great job retouching your spiny anemone that you decide to add, by cloning, another anemone to your image, go ahead. It’s all up to you. By using the Reselect command, you can easily load the selection again rather than start the selection from scratch.

The Reselect command only works for the last selection you made, so don’t go planning to reselect a selection you made last week — or even ten minutes ago — if you’ve selected something else in the meantime.

Swapping a selection
Sometimes it’s easier for you to select what you don’t want than it is to select what you do. For example, if you’re trying to select your pet dog, photographed against a neutral background, why spend valuable time meticulously selecting him with the Pen or Lasso tool, when you can just click the background with the Magic Wand tool? (Don’t forget to use the Shift key to select bits of background you might have missed the first time.)

After you’ve selected the background, just choose Select➪Inverse. Presto, you now have Fido the Retriever selected and obediently awaiting your next command.

Feathering a selection
In previous posts I described how to feather (blur the edges) a selection when using the
Lasso and Marquee tools by entering a value in the Feather box in the Options bar. This method of feathering requires that you set your Feather radius before you create your selection.

Unfortunately, using this method, a problem arises if you want to modify the initial selection. When you make a selection with a feather, the marquee outline of the selection adjusts to take into account the amount of the feather. That means that the resulting marquee outline doesn’t resemble your precise mouse movement. As a result, modifying, adding, or subtracting from your original selection is pretty tough.

A much better way to feather a selection is to make your initial selection without a feather, as shown in top image of Figure 3-8. Clean up your selection as you need to, and then apply your feather by choosing Select➪Feather. Enter a Feather Radius value and click OK.

The radius is how far out in all directions the feather extends. A radius of 8 means the feather extends 8 pixels to the right, left, up, and down from the selection outline. A large feather radius makes the image appear to fade out.