Selections Make Layers More Useful

Up until now, I've been making all of my edits directly on the Background layer, which is a very bad way to work because it means that I've been making changes to my original photo. If I was to save my changes and close out of the document window, the original image would be lost forever. Sometimes that may be fine, but it tends to leave a bad impression when you're forced to call up a client and ask, "Would you happen to have another copy of the photo you sent over? I sort of... well, hehe... I kind of ruined the copy you gave me".

A much better way to work in Photoshop is to use layers. With layers, we can work on a copy of the image while leaving the original unharmed, and thanks to selections, we can even copy different parts of an image to their own layers so we can work on them independently! Without the ability to make selections though, layers in Photoshop would be nowhere near as useful as they are.

I'm going to revert my image back to its original, unedited state by going up to the File menu and choosing Revert. This sets my image back to the way it was when I first opened it:

A very common Photoshop effect is to leave something in the image in full color while converting the rest of the photo to black and white. Let's see how selections can help us to do this. First, since we just said that working directly on the Background layer is a bad thing, let's duplicate the Background layer, which will give us a copy of it that we can work on. To do that, I'll go up to the Layer menu at the top of the screen, then I'll choose New, and then I'll choose Layer via Copy:

If we look in the Layers panel, we can see that we now have two layers - the Background layer on the bottom which holds the original photo, and a new layer above it which Photoshop has named "Layer 1", containing a copy of the photo that we can safely edit without harming the original:

Notice that the entire Background layer was copied. We'll come back to this in a moment. Since we want to leave the apple with its original colors while converting everything else to black and white, we'll need to select the apple before we do anything else, so I'll once again draw a selection around it. Our familiar selection outline reappears:

With the apple selected, I'm going to create another copy of the image by going back up to the Layer menu, choosing New and then choosing Layer via Copy. Remember that the last time we did this, Photoshop copied the entire layer. This time though, something different has happened. We now have a third layer in the Layers panel sitting above "Layer 1" and the Background layer, but if we look in the preview thumbnail to the left of the new layer's name, we can see that all we copied this time was the apple itself, not the entire layer:

Any time we have a selection active when we copy a layer, only the area inside the selection outline is copied, which is why in this case, only the apple was copied. This ability to isolate a specific object in a photo and place it on its own layer is what makes layers so incredibly useful. If we couldn't select anything first, all we could do is make copy after copy of the entire image, which is usually about as pointless as it sounds.

Now that my apple is sitting all by itself above the other layers, I'm going to click on "Layer 1" in the Layers panel to select it. Selected layers appear highlighted in blue in the Layers panel, and now anything I do next will be applied to the copy of the original image on "Layer 1", leaving the apple on the top layer untouched:

To convert the image to black and white, I'll quickly desaturate it by going up to the Image menu, choosing Adjustments and then choosing Desaturate:

Desaturating an image is certainly not the best way to convert a color photo to black and white, but it works in a hurry. Let's look again in the Layers panel, where we can see in the preview thumbnail for "Layer 1" that the copy of our original image now appears in black and white, while the apple on the layer above it has been unaffected and remains in color:

Since the apple is sitting on a layer above the black and white version of the image, it appears in full color in front of the black and white image in the document window:

Of course, there's a lot more we can do with selections in Photoshop than just painting inside of them or copying them to new layers, but hopefully this gave us an idea of why selections are so important. Photoshop sees only pixels where we see independent objects, so we need selections as a way to bridge the gap between our world and Photoshop's world. And while layers can stake their claim as one of the biggest and best features of Photoshop, they owe more of their usefulness to selections than they'd probably care to admit.

Now that we have some idea of why we need selections, how do we actually make them? We'll look at that next, beginning with one of the most commonly used selection tools in Photoshop, the Rectangular Marquee Tool!

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