Defining Good Selections

So how can you tell whether a selection is good? It’s simple. Good selections are made quickly, easily, and accurately. There are many types of selections you can make, and each type requires the use of specific tools. Therefore, it’s worth taking the time to learn how to use all of the selection tools before you start making selections. After you familiarize yourself with all of the tools, it will become much easier to identify which ones are best for making particular selections. Work smart, not hard—that’s what I always say!

The Selection Border
One thing that nearly every selection has in common (with the exception of those made with the Extract filter, Magic Eraser, and Background Eraser tools) is the selection border. This is Photoshop’s way of showing you that an area is selected. When you make a selection with the majority of these tools, a blinking dashed border appears around the selected area. This border is often referred to as the marching ants, because it resembles a workforce of ants busily marching around your selection.

Hide The Selection Border
Sometimes the marching ants can become very distracting. For example, to clearly see an effect that you’d like to apply to a selected area (such as a Gaussian blur), it helps to hide the marching ants. After you’re confident that you’ve made an accurate selection, you can hide the ants by pressing F/Ctrl+H. You can then apply the effect without all of the distraction. To reveal the selection, press F/Ctrl+H again.

The Tools Palette
By default, the Tools palette appears in a single column docked on the left side of your screen. The Tools palette contains all the various tools available to you—each one represented by a descriptive icon. However, if you’re still not sure what tool you’re viewing, hover your mouse over it in the palette until a small tool tip description appears.

You can activate a tool by clicking its icon, or by typing its assigned keyboard shortcut (which is included in the tool tip). Any icon showing a small arrow in the bottom-right corner indicates an available toolset—more tools are “hidden” under the one shown. Clicking and holding the icon reveals a flyout menu of additional tools. There are two ways to display the Tools palette on your screen. The default is the new singlecolumn format, but by clicking the right-facing arrows above the palette, you can change it to display in the traditional double-column format. The Tools palette view can be changed whether it is docked or free-floating.

The Marquee Tools
You can use the marquee tools to select a fixed rectangular or elliptical region of an image. Want to select an image of a door? If so, the Rectangular Marquee tool is your best bet. Or maybe you’d like to select just the doorknob? You guessed it. Use the Elliptical Marquee tool. But if these simple geometric forms seem too limiting, don’t worry. In fact, when selecting images, there’s also a lot more you can do with these tools than you may realize. You don’t have to use the marquee tools exclusively for selecting image elements that are rectangular or elliptical. It’s also possible to use them to select portions of an image. Maybe you’d like to blend the top half of one photograph with the bottom half of another. You can do so by using the Rectangular Marquee tool. The marquee selection tools can also be great for creating geometric shapes to be used in layer masks and clipping groups.

The Rectangular Marquee
The Rectangular Marquee tool selects a rectangular area of the image that you define by dragging diagonally from any corner. You access the Rectangular Marquee tool by clicking and holding the currently visible Marquee tool icon in the Tools palette and selecting Rectangular Marquee Tool from the pop-up menu that appears. You can also toggle between the Rectangular and Elliptical Marquee tools by pressing Shift+M.