Everything you always wanted to know about making Selections

Note: This is the first in a series of tutorials about methods to make selections. It starts with the very basic, then in the passing weeks, we will progress to more advanced—and quicker—techniques. As always here at Photoshop Fitness, the emphasis will be on how the portrait and wedding photographer can make use of these tools and techniques. Although the examples shown here are from CS4, they all apply equally to CS, CS2, and CS3 (unless otherwise noted) even though the appearance in the examples may vary slightly from what you see in other versions.

Selection Techniques

Chapter 1: The most basic selection tool there is

Although not the first thing to come to mind when someone mentions “selection”, perhaps it should be. I’m talking about the lowly, but useful, Select All. The shortcut, which all should learn, is Cmd A (PC: Cntl A). This selects the entire layer that is active (the active layer is the one that is highlighted in the Layers panel.)

This is used for many different things, but one of the common ones is to select a layer and copy and paste it to a different document. But its behavior when doing so rates a mention here, because it may not act the way you think.

In this example, you see a simple two-layered image—a black rectangle on one layer and a white background layer.  If you press Cmd A (PC: Cntl A) to Select All, you will see so-called “marching ants” which represents the area that is selected—in this case, the entire layer. But what is it selecting—the black rectangle, the white background, or both? The answer is, since the layer with the black rectangle is the one that is selected, that entire layer is selected, not the background.

You can see this when you press Cmd C (PC: Cntl C) to copy, followed by Cmd V (PC: Cntl V) to paste. As you see in the example, the black rectangle got pasted to a new layer, and it was placed directly in the center. If I instead had gone to a different image before I hit Cmd V, the behavior would be the same—it would get pasted to the center of that image. I leave that for the reader to confirm.

What if you don’t want it placed right in the middle? What if you want if pasted right in the same spot where it is, just on a different layer? That’s easy—Cmd J (PC: Cntl J) (Important Tip!!!) will cut and paste to a new layer right where it is right now. That’s what I did here. Although you see only one rectangle, if you look in the Layers panel you see there are two identical layers with the black rectangle.

I can move that rectangle around by selecting the Move tool (by pressing V) or temporarily turning my present tool, whatever it is, (IMPORTANT TIP!!) to the Move tool by holding down the Cmd (PC: Cntl) key and then dragging the rectangle to the desired spot.

What if you don’t want another rectangle, but you do want a selection of the area that the rectangle occupies? It could be that you want to use it for a Layer Mask (see Layer Mask tutorial in the archives) or perhaps you want to post something into that spot. All you need to do is to Cmd click (PC: Cntl click) on the icon of the layer on which it resides. When you do that, every thing non-transparent on that layer is selected. That means even a 1% opacity pixel on that layer will be selected!

For next time: The Marquee Tool.