Photoshop Pen Tool: Making Selections With The Pen Tool

Turning A Path Into A Selection

So far, we've looked at what a path is and how to draw a basic path with Photoshop's Pen Tool. But how do you go about making a selection from the path?

Easy! There's a couple of ways to turn a path into a selection, including a handy keyboard shortcut, but before we look at the quick way, let's look at the official way. The "official way" involves using Photoshop's Paths palette, which you'll find grouped in with the Layers palette and the Channels palette:

At first glance, the Paths palette looks very similar to Photoshop's Layers palette, and Adobe purposely made it like that so you'll feel more comfortable using it. We can see a thumbnail preview of the shape of the path we just created, and by default, Photoshop names the path "Work Path", which is basically a fancy way of saying "temporary", as in if you were to create a different path now without renaming this path to something else first, this one would be replaced by the new path. You can only have one "Work Path", so if you want to keep it, you'll need to double-click on its name in the Paths palette and name it something else before creating a new path.

Since my path looks a bit like a crown, I'm going to double-click on the name "Work Path", which with bring up Photoshop's Save Path dialog box, and I'm going to rename my path "Crown":

I'll click OK when I'm done, and now if I look in my Paths palette again, I can see that sure enough, my "Work Path" has been renamed "Crown":

By renaming it, the path is now saved and won't disappear on me if I go to create a new path. Also, any saved paths are saved with the Photoshop document, so now, if I save my document, the path will be saved with it and the next time I open the document, the path will still be there in the Paths palette.

Saving a path is not something you need to do in order to turn it into a selection. In most cases when using the Pen Tool to make selections, you won't have any need for the path once you've made a selection from it, so there won't be any need to save it. If you did want to save it though, just rename it to something other than "Work Path" and it's saved.

To turn the path into a selection, if we look at the bottom of the Paths palette, we can see several icons. These icons allow us to do different things with our path. The first icon on the left is the Fill path with Foreground color icon, and as its name implies, clicking on it will fill our path with our current Foreground color. Interesting, but that's not what we want. The second icon from the left is the Stroke path with brush icon, which will apply a stroke to our path using whatever brush we currently have selected. This is a great way to create interesting effects in Photoshop, but for what we're doing here, turning a path into a selection, it's not what we want either. The one we want is the third icon from the left, the Load path as a selection icon:

As soon as I click on this icon, my path inside my document becomes a selection, as if I had created it using any of Photoshop's more common selection tools:

It's that easy! In fact, it's even easier than that because there's a keyboard shortcut for turning a path into a selection without having to switch to the Paths palette at all. When you've drawn your path and you're ready to turn it into a selection, simply press Ctrl+Enter (Win) / Command+Return (Mac) to have Photoshop convert the path into a selection.

By now, it may be a little more obvious to you why, even though the Pen Tool is very much a selection tool, it's not grouped in with the other selection tools at the top of the Tools palette. The reason is because the Pen Tool is primarily a path tool. It creates selections by first creating paths, and for that reason, it has more in common with the various Shape Tools and the Type Tool, all of which use paths , than it has with the basic selection tools like the Rectangular Marquee Tool or the Lasso Tool, which make selections based only on pixels.

Let's look at a practical example of what we've learned so far. Here we have a photo of a stop sign in front of some rocky cliffs:

Let's say I wanted to select that stop sign so I can copy it onto its own layer. The stop sign is made up of nothing more than a series of straight lines, which is going to make this extremely easy. First, I need a starting point for my path, so I'll start in the top left corner of the sign by clicking once to place an initial anchor point. In this case, it doesn't really matter where I start the path, but I'll start in the top left corner:

Notice how I'm zoomed in here as I click. You'll find it easier when making selections with the Pen Tool to zoom in a little on your image. That way, you can be sure you're keeping your path just inside the area you want to select.

Right now, I don't have a path, I just have a starting point for my path. To create the path, all I need to do is go around the sign adding an anchor point in each corner where the path needs to change direction. As I add each anchor point, a new path segment will appear joining the previous anchor point with the new one, until I've gone all the way around the sign. To close the path, I'll simply click back on the initial starting point. It's a little hard to see in the screenshot below, but I now have a path around the entire stop sign, including the post it's attached to, simply by going around clicking in the corners where the path needs to change direction:

If I look in my Paths palette now, I can see very clearly that I have a path in the shape of the stop sign:

Notice how Photoshop has named the path "Work Path", which means that this path is temporary and I'll lose it if I create a different path without saving this one first by renaming it. Even if I don't create a new path, I'll still lose it when I close out of the document unless I save it first. I have no need to save this path though, so I won't worry about it. In most cases, you won't need to worry about it either.

To convert my path into a selection, I'll click on the Load path as a selection icon at the bottom of the Layers palette, or I could just as easily press Ctrl+Enter (Win) / Command+Return (Mac):

As soon as I do, my path is converted into a selection, and the stop sign is now selected:

I'll switch back over to my Layers palette, and to copy the stop sign onto its own layer, I'll use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+J (Win) / Command+J (Mac), which places the sign on its own layer above the Background layer:

With the sign now on its own layer, I can do whatever I like with it, swapping the background with a different image, or making the background black and white while leaving the sign in color, whatever I can think of. The point is that I was able to easily select the sign by clicking in the corners with the Pen Tool, which created a path around the sign, and then I simply converted the path into a selection.

Next, we're going to take things up a notch and look at how to use the Pen Tool to select curved shapes!