Summary: There's lots of ways to make selections in Photoshop, some simple, some advanced, but having lots of ways to do something doesn't explain why we need to do it in the first place, so in this tutorial, we'll look at why we need to make selections in Photoshop at all, and why Photoshop doesn't see things like we do.

Written by Steve Patterson
Exclusively for Photoshop Essentials.com.

Part of our complete collection of Photoshop Basics tutorials.

As you may have already discovered on your own if you've read through any of our other Photoshop tutorials here at Photoshop Essentials, I'm a big fan of "why". Lots of people will happily tell us how to do something, but for whatever reason, the why is usually left out, forever limiting our understanding of what it is we're doing.

Take selections in Photoshop, for example. There's no shortage of ways to select things in an image with Photoshop. We can make simple geometric selections with the Rectangular Marquee Tool or the Elliptical Marquee Tool, or freehand selections with the Lasso, Polygonal Lasso or Magnetic Lasso Tools. We can select areas of similar color or brightness values with the Magic Wand or Color Range command. We can paint or refine a selection manually with a brush in Quick Mask mode or by using a layer mask. We can make surgically-precise selections with the Pen Tool, and more! We can even combine different selection methods when none of them by themselves seem to be up to the challenge.

None of this, however, explains why we need to make selections in the first place, so in this tutorial, we'll take a quick look at the "why". This won't be a detailed explanation of how to make selections. We'll save that for other tutorials. Here, we're simply going to look at why we need to make selections at all.

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Do You See What I See?

As I write this, summer is once again coming to an end. The days are getting shorter, the nights are cooler, and around here, with autumn fast approaching, the weekend farmers markets will soon be filled with bushels and bushels of apples. In fact, here's some right now just waiting to be picked:

Obviously, the main subject in the photo above is the apples, right? But why is it obvious? How do we know that we're looking at apples? We know because most of us have seen enough apples in the past that we can instantly recognize them. We know their shape, their color and their texture because we've seen them before. We could even point to each apple in the photo if someone asked us to without mistakenly pointing at a leaf or something else that isn't an apple because we have no problem distinguishing between all the different objects in the image. We see things with our eyes and our brain tells us that this is this and that is that, and this is not that and that is not this. In fact, even if we had never seen an apple before, we could at least point to all the objects that look relatively the same. We're so good at recognizing and identifying objects that we usually do it without consciously thinking about it.

That's great for us, but what about Photoshop? Does Photoshop see the apples? Does Photoshop recognize their shape, color and texture as "apple"? Can it point to all the apples in the photo without confusing an apple with a leaf, or at least point to all the objects that look the same?

The simple answer is no, it can't. No matter how many photos of apples you've opened in Photoshop in the past (geez, what is it with you and apples?), Photoshop has no idea what apples are or what they look like. The reason is because all Photoshop sees is pixels. It doesn't matter if it's a photo of apples, oranges or monkeys eating bananas. To Photoshop, it's all the same. It's all just pixels, those tiny little squares that make up a digital photo:

What this unfortunately means for us is that we can't simply click on something in a photo and expect Photoshop to instantly select it for us because what we see as separate and independent objects, Photoshop sees as nothing but different colored pixels. So how do we get around this little problem of miscommunication? Well, since we can't expect Photoshop to think like us, we need to think like Photoshop. We need a way to tell Photoshop that we want to work on these pixels here but not those pixels there. We can't tell Photoshop that we want to change the color of the apple, for example, but we can tell it that we want to change the color of the pixels that, to us, make up that apple. We do that by first selecting those pixels in the photo, and we do that by making... you guessed it... selections!

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