Photoshop Tutorial: Making Selections In Photoshop

Making selections in Photoshop is an essential skill if you plan on doing anything even remotely interesting with your photos and images.

Without the ability to select a specific part or parts of an image, anything we do to the image would apply to the entire image. If you wanted to sharpen someone's eyes in a photo, for example, without sharpening any other parts of their face or of the photo, you couldn't do it. You'd have to sharpen the entire photograph.

Same with blurring part of the image, which is an effective technique for reducing the importance of certain areas of the photo, like the background for example, and drawing attention to the main subject. Without the ability to select only the areas you wanted to blur, you'd have to blur the entire photo. Blurring certain areas while sharpening others is a great way to add a sense of depth to an image, yet without selections, you couldn't do it.

As I said, there really isn't much you could do as far as editing, retouching, or even creating special effects inside a photo, without knowing how to make selections.

Of course, when you combine selections with the use of layers, you have all the freedom you need to accomplish even the most demanding, complex tasks which would otherwise have been impossible without selections.

Fortunately, Photoshop comes with lots of different ways to make those selections, including some tools in the Tools palette designed specifically for making basic selections. There are more advanced (though not necessarily more difficult) ways of making more complex selections, but these basic selection tools still serve a purpose, and in fact are used so often that Adobe went ahead and placed them right at the very top of the Tools palette, as shown below:

Photoshop's Selection Tools

If you're wondering why your Tools palette isn't showing those extra boxes that you see in the screenshot above, it's because those extra boxes, commonly referred to as "flyout menus " or simply "flyouts", contain tools which are normally hidden behind other tools in the Tools palette in order to save space on the screen. You can tell when a tool has other tools hiding behind it in the Tools palette because it will have a small black arrow in the bottom right corner of the tool's icon. To access the flyout so you can view the other tools hiding behind it, just click and hold your mouse button down on the tool's icon for a second and the flyout will appear. You can then select any of the tools in the flyout menu simply by clicking on the name of the tool.

There's six tool icons displaying in the Selection Tools group of the Tools palette, and twelve tools in total when you count the additional hidden tools. One of these tools though - the Move Tool in the top right corner - isn't a selection tool at all but is used instead to move selections around on the screen after you've created them, which is why it's included with the actual selection tools.

For this section, we're going to focus on the main selection tools that you'll use most often, which are:

• The Marquee Tools
• The Lasso Tools
• The Magic Wand Tool

The Marquee Tools include the "Rectangular Marquee Tool", the "Elliptical Marquee Tool", and the "Single Row" and "Single Column" Marquee Tools and are used to create simple, shape-based selections.

The Lasso Tools, which are used to draw freehand selections, include the "Lasso Tool" itself, as well as the "Polygonal Lasso Tool" and the "Magnetic Lasso Tool".

The other selection tool we'll look at is the "Magic Wand", which has nothing to do with Harry Potter and everything to do with making selections based on color and brightness values.

Next Section: The Marquee Tools