After getting comfortable with the marquee selection tool in Photoshop and the basic options provided, you want a little more flexibility making selections. Your selections aren’t always square and often you need to modify and make corrections to your selection. Photoshop has just the tools you need and these are still within the family of ‘manual’ selections.
Being able to make precise adjustment, being able to control the size of your marquee selections offers precision and it turns your selection tool into a design tool. As you begin to visualize your final product, if you plan to use a blend of images, having tool features like this take much of the guesswork out of your build.
Using the elliptical version of the marquee selection tool is almost identical to the rectangular option. When you choose this pull down option (click on the small arrow on the lower left of the rectangular marquee tool) and begin making a selection, you see the moving selection pattern is now shaped like an ellipse. Like converting your selection pattern to a perfect square with the rectangular marquee, if you hold the shift key while creating this selection pattern, your selection will be drawn as a perfect circle.
The same options apply for your selection style here. If you change the normal style to ‘fixed ratio’, your selection pattern will be drawn as a circle. If you change your selection style to ‘Fixed Size’ and key in the width and height values, you can specify the exact dimension in pixels or inches.
It’s easy to move your selection area around once defining it. Create you selection area, then without changing to another Photoshop tool, click on the selection area to move it around. For nearly every tool or mode you are in, Photoshop has visual ‘helpers’ to indicate a mode or option. In this case, if you move your cursor outside the selection area and click, you are redefining your selection by adding a new point.
If you move your cursor around inside the selection area you should see a visual queue like the selection indicator, the moving hyphens, next to your cursor. Now click with your mouse and start moving your selection area around. The other neat trick using elliptical selections is using the’ alt’ key when you begin your selection pattern.
If you have been trying some of these options, deselect your selection area, (‘Ctrl D’ to deselect), place your mouse cursor at the point you would like to be the center of your selection area but enter the ‘alt’ key while dragging out the outline of your selection area. You will see that now, the selection is created with your first point being the center of your selection area.
Finally, it really helps me to practice and try different variations ‘back to back’ to get past some of the confusion that exists when using these selection options. A favorite is following a tutorial or looking at guide, then going back to Photoshop and clicking your mouse to return. This ‘click’ when you return is interpreted as a selection ‘click’ and changes your selection boundary. Be careful when going back and forth, and this is a good habit with any application, to click in the border regions of your software instead of the design ‘stage’ so your click is taken only as reactivating you application, not modifying your previous selection.
It helps me to turn things off and on. Try options a few times back to back just to create that confidence that the subtle differences (whether you cursor is inside the selection area or not), are visual signs that you catch quickly so your actions produce the results you expect.
Create a selection area, then deselect, then create essentially the same area but using the ‘alt’ key, seeing that this time, the selection is created with your first point as the center of the selection. Create a selection area, then move your cursor inside and out to see how easily you either: move the entire selection area with your cursor inside, or redefine the selection area with your cursor outside the chosen boundary.
All these tools and helpers really are helpful. With practice they become subconscious like many of the signals you read when you are driving a car… but it does take just a little practice. Once you cross this small hurdle you can focus on the fun part, getting these tools to work for you and your design creation.
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