Selections Part 2: The Marquee Tool

The first tool in the Tool panel after the Move tool is the Marquee tool. I’m guessing that Adobe put the tools roughly in order of frequency of use, and the Marquee tool deserves its spot. It is one of the quickest ways to select an area. Its shortcut key is M. Just M. I suppose I should say “m” as you do not hit the shift key, but the convention is to write it as M. We will follow this convention—unless I specifically say “Shift”, there will be no shift.

The default Marquee is the Rectangular Marquee tool, used to make a rectangular selection—duh! It only selects what is on the active layer—just because you’ve drawn your marching ants around your target, does not mean it is selected. It needs to be on the same layer as your intended target.

Some additional tips about using the Marquee tool—if you want to constrain your rectangle to be an exact square, hold down the Shift key while you drag. Normally, the tool will start at the upper left corner of your rectangle—if you want it to start from the center of your drag, hold down the Option key (PC: Alt).

What are some of its uses? There are so many but I will give a few examples of what I use it for.

Selecting one object among several on a layer. Hitting M, then dragging a rectangle around one object on a layer is about the quickest way to do it. I do this all the time if I decide to move objects (usually photos) around when I didn’t save them on separate layers. I commonly do this with album designs. While I could save each photo to its own layer, that takes extra drive space, makes for slower processing, and takes longer if you feel compelled to actually name the layers. Since I only rarely have to change the order of things, it just didn’t seem worth it to me. YMMV.

Anyway, here you see a file with two layers, with several photos on the top layer plus a background layer below. Let’s say that a client has decided to remove one. Steps: M, draw rectangle around image to remove, hit Delete (PC: Backspace). That’s it!

What if I want to move it? Steps: M, draw rectangle around image to move, select Move tool (by holding down the Cmd (PC: Cntl) key—remember?) and move to the desired spot. Important Tip: If you need to line up the object you are moving with one of the other objects, make sure you have Smart Guides turned on. You find the toggle for them under View—Show—Smart Guides. You should also turn on View—Snap to—Guides.

With Smart Guides turned on, when any edge or the center of the object you are moving lines up with an edge or center of another object, guide lines appear and the object snaps to it. If it snapped to the wrong line, just keep dragging until it snaps to the one you want.

The Elliptical Marquee is accessed by either clicking and holding your cursor over the Marquee tool, then scrolling down, or by hitting Shift M if already in the Marquee tool. If you are not in the Marquee tool already, probably the fastest way is to hit Shift M twice. The Shift isn’t really necessary for the first M, but it doesn’t hurt either. I just find it easier to hold down the shift key and press M twice.

But—I seldom use this tool. I would be curious to hear from wedding and portrait photographers what they use this for. As with the rectangular, the elliptical can be constrained, this time as a perfect circle, by holding down the shift key as you drag. And if you hold down the Option key (PC: Alt) the selection will be centered on where you began to drag. By the way, you can hold down the shift and the Option key to combine the effects.

The Single Row/Column Marquees are seldom used by most people, and that is too bad. They can be quite useful for drawing lines. Often, it is a rectangular shape, such as a photo, that you are putting a border around. But what if you have several photos adjoining each other, and you want the same border around the outside, and in between them?

If you try the trick in the previous post (if you haven’t read it, go to Adding Borders With Square Corners first) and stroke inside each photo, the strokes between the images are twice as thick—as you see below. And no, I wouldn’t make pink borders, nor make them this wide, but thin black borders made it harder to see what I’m talking about.

Now you could just try to nudge them closer to each other—and hope you guess right. Or, you can try this:

1. Merge the three layers. I’m going to tell you two ways to do it, so that you will learn more in this tutorial. The first way is to highlight the layer on top, then Merge down twice. Cmd E (PC: Cntl E) twice. The second is to highlight the top layer, then hold down the Shift key and click on the bottom layer (NOT THE BACKGROUND!) then hit Cmd E (PC: Cntl E). If I only had 3 layers, I would do it the first way. If I had 10, I’d use the second way.

2. Stroke the merged layers Inside. Now the outside of the three layers is stroked.
3. Go to the Marquee tool and scroll down to Single Row Marquee Tool.

4. Click exactly between two of the images. Holding down the Shift key (to add to the selection) click between the other two. There should now be two parallel horizontal dashed lines. NOTE: sometimes you can’t see all of the dashed lines—they are only 1 pixel wide, after all. Don’t worry, they are still there.

5. Go to the bottom of the Layers panel and click on the create a new layer button, the second from the right. You want the lines you are about to stroke to be on a separate layer.
6. Make sure your Foreground color is what you want for the stroke, then go to Edit—Stroke. Enter the pixel width you want—the same width you already used to stroke the outsides of the images. Then choose Center and click OK.

Now you have your lines, but they go all the way across. We take care of that in the next step.

7. Keeping the layer with the strokes highlighted, Cmd click (PC: Cntl click) on the layer icon for the merged three photos. This will select the photos.

Now hit Cmd (PC: Cntl) Shift I to invert the selection, which now selects everything outside of the photos.

Then hit Delete (PC: Backspace) and the extraneous parts of the strokes disappear and you are done.

Here I’ve turned off all the layers except the one that has the in between borders just to show you what we made.

So, you might think “Wow, that’s a lot of steps for that, I think I will just nudge, like you said above.” Well, that would be fine for something as simple as this, but what if this were 5 photos in a row? Or what if there were 2 or three rows in a block? Now this technique starts to look a lot more attractive! Use the Single Row and Single Column Marquees while holding down the shift key, make a new layer, stroke Center, Cmd click on the merged photos, invert the selection, Delete—done! I can do a 3×3 block in 15-20 seconds.