Photoshop - Making Manual Selections in Photoshop

Photoshop has a variety of selection tools and techniques but a great place to start is with the most fundamental tools: the manual selection tools. As you learn to use masking and channels and selection tools like the Magic Wand, you will be able to make more refined selections but like the basics in most of our life skills, you will find yourself regularly coming back… to the basics.

It is not an accident that when you look at the Photoshop tool menu, at the very top, right after the move tool pointer, come the selection tools. You will see at the very top the rectangular marquee tool, the lasso tool, with each showing pull down arrows that indicate options on the top level tool. For example, the marquee default shape of a rectangle can easily be chosen as an elliptical shape which would be much more useful for circular shapes.

The default setting for the marquee tool is the rectangular shape. To apply the rectangular selection tool simply describe the shape you want by choosing the upper left and lower right points that define your rectangle. Click twice and you will see a moving dotted line defining your selection. To deselect you chosen area, simply click your mouse outside the rectangle, or enter a ‘Ctrl D’ to deselect.

Sometimes it is difficult to distinguish the edges from what you have selected and its nearest neighbor. A cool feature of selections is that you can use the move tool to select what you have selected and move it around a bit. This might seem funny. Usually you are going to apply a filter or copy this part of your image elsewhere but it is a really helpful visual aid to simply grab it and see exactly what you have chosen. If there is a question about its proximity to a neighbor, when you pull it off by itself so to speak, its much easier to see that extra bit of border that you picked up or left behind and this can help you refine your selection.

Of course like all other actions in most of our software applications, to ‘undo’ your last move, simply enter ‘Ctrl Z’. If you try the little trick above, move your selection away just to review, entering ‘Ctrl Z’ will undo this move, returning your selection to its original location.

Say for example, you have created your rectangular selection and its just a wee bit off to one side or the other? Using the arrow keys will move your select rectangle, up down, right or left. This too is very helpful when you apply your selection but want to fine tune or maybe compare slightly different selections.

There are many more helpful techniques and ways to refine your selection. Many apply to the most basic selection tools. Have fun experimenting. Drag your selection away from the rest of the image to get a good snapshot of what it will contain for confidence. Explore the more refined methods to open yourself to the many possibilities Photoshop selections provide.