Unlock The Full Power Of Basic Selections In Photoshop

Full Power Of Basic Selections: The Four Main Selection Options In The Options Bar

Before we go any further, with my Rectangular Marquee Tool selected, let's take a look up in the Options Bar, specifically at four little icons on the left side of the Options Bar:

They may look small, but each of those four little icons is very powerful, because each one represents a different option for working with our selections. The first one on the left, the one I'm clicking on in the screenshot above, is the New Selection icon, and it's the one that's selected by default when working in Photoshop. All it does is create a new selection each time. If you never knew these four options were there, this is the option you've always been using without even knowing it.

The second icon directly beside it is the one we're going to look at here, the Add To Selection icon:

With this option selected, any selection I draw will be added to any selection(s) I've already made. Let's see how this can help us select our shape.

First, I'm going to click back on the "New Selection" icon since I'm going to drag out my initial selection around the bottom half of the shape, the same as I did before:

Now that I have my initial selection, I'm going to select that "Add To Selection" option so that I can add another selection to this one. Rather than selecting the option from the Options Bar though, I'm going to use the quick keyboard shortcut, which is to simply hold down the Shift key just before I start dragging out my selection. As soon as you press the Shift key, you'll see a small "plus sign" icon in the bottom right corner of your cursor, which indicates that you're about to add to the existing selection:

Let's try selecting that top square part again. With my Shift key held down, I'm going to drag out another selection around that square section in the top right of the shape. This time, rather than trying to select just the square, I'm going to select some of the area below the square as well so that this second selection overlaps my intial one:

One quick note... You don't need to continue holding down the Shift key the whole time you're dragging out additional selections. All you need to do is hold down Shift, then click your mouse to start dragging out the selection, and once you've started dragging, you can safely release the Shift key.

Now that I've dragged out my second selection that I'm adding to my intial selection, I'm going to release my mouse button, and look what happens:

Thanks to the "Add To Selection" option, which I accessed simply by holding down my Shift key, my second selection has been added to my initial selection, and my once impossible to select shape has now been completely selected.

Let's look at a common real world example to see how beneficial the "Add To Selection" option really is.