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.

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.

Here is what the edge artifacts look like:

The edge near the hat is the easier of the two to fix. It can be done just by cloning the forehead area below. But I’m going to start the process by fixing it the same way I will with the harder-to-fix neck shadow. And the same way I will restore the background to a nicer darker black.

I’ll do this by dragging this modified version on top of the original file, and adding a Layer Mask, resulting in the two layers you see here.

By painting on the mask (it looks and feels like you are painting on the image, but with the white rectangle selected in the layers panel, as you see above, you are actually painting on the mask) I blended those areas with the more natural edges on the original layer below. The area by the hat, I used a small brush at 50%. I used a larger brush, but at 25% to blend the neck shadow. The next image shows you the resulting Layers panel and what the mask looks like (greatly magnified so that you can see how I went over the area several times, subtley building up density.

So here is the image with the edges fixed:

Continuing with the same mask, I painted in the background. Below is the image, and what its Layer Mask looks like:

Next, I used Shadow/Highlights (Image—Adjustments) to bring back some highlight details on the chest and abdomen. Here is the result and the settings:

You could stop here, if you like the color version. The next step was a conversion to B&W, a raising of contrast, and elimination of banding in the background—but that’s a tutorial for another day.

But I feel it is an expensive plugin, when I use it so sparingly. So it’s nice to know that there are ways to achieve a very similar look, with the programs you already have.

Here is my final image. In Part 1, I am going to show you how to get most of the way here. In Part 2, I will show you the steps to refine and finish the image.

To do this effect, you need Photoshop CS3 or CS4 or Lightroom 2.x. I used a Raw file. You could use a JPEG as well, but because of the extreme adjustments for this effect, you are better off with a Raw file.

Open the image in Photoshop or Lightroom. A Raw file should open automatically in Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) if you doubleclick on the file. Once open, you want to start with the following settings. I am showing Lightroom, but the settings and the order of the settings are exactly the same in ACR—it just LOOKS different.

That is your starting point. You can fiddle with the settings until your particular image looks right. But those are the setting that took the following image . . .

. . . and made it into this:

That’s the first part. Unfortunately, these settings often cause unwanted edge effects. I will point those out and show how to fix them in Part 2.

See you next week!