Repositioning Selections As You're Drawing Them

If you're following along with your own photo, you probably just noticed one of the big differences between using the Rectangular and Elliptical Marquee Tools. With the Rectangular Marquee Tool, the corner of the selection always remains at the exact spot you clicked on to begin the selection, no matter how large of a selection you drag out. With the Elliptical Marquee Tool, things get a bit trickier. Since elliptical shapes are rounded without any corners, the selection outline moves further and further away from the spot you initially clicked on as you drag out the selection. This can make it next to impossible to begin the selection at exactly the right spot you needed.

Fortunately, the same trick for repositioning selections as you're drawing them with the Rectangular Marquee Tool works with the Elliptical Marquee Tool. Simply hold down your spacebar as you're drawing the oval selection and drag with your mouse to move it back into position, then release your spacebar and continue dragging it out. You'll most likely find that you need to move the selection several times as you're drawing it, so just hold down your spacebar each time, drag the selection outline back into place, then release the spacebar and continue dragging out the selection.

When you're happy with the size, shape and location of your oval selection, release your mouse button to complete it. We can now see an elliptical selection outline surrounding the couple in the photo:

Feathering A Selection

In a moment, I'm going to use the oval selection I created with the Elliptical Marquee Tool to knock out the center of the solid white layer, creating my vignette effect. The only problem is that by default, selection edges are hard, and what I really need to create my vignette effect is a soft, smooth transition between the selected and unselected areas of the photo. We can soften selection edges in Photoshop by "feathering" them, and we do that by going up to the Select menu at the top of the screen, choosing Modify, and then choosing Feather:

This brings up Photoshop's Feather Selection dialog box. I'm going to set my Feather Radius value to around 30 pixels, which should be large enough to give me a smooth transition area between the white vignette edges and the couple in the center of the photo. The exact value you use for your image will depend on the size of your photo and will probably require some trial and error before you get it exactly right:

I'll click OK to exit out of the dialog box. Photoshop feathers the selection edges for me, although we won't actually see the effect of the feathering until we do something with the selection, as we're about to do. I'm going to click back on the Layer Visibility icon on "Layer 1" to bring back the solid white fill:

This fills the document window with white once again, making it easy to see the selection outline we created:

Finally, to complete the vignette effect, I'll simply press Delete (Win) / Backspace (Mac) on my keyboard to delete the area of white inside the selection outline. To remove the selection outline since I no longer need it, I'll click anywhere inside the document window with the Elliptical Marquee Tool. Notice the soft transition between the white edges and the photo in the center thanks to the feathering we applied:

The Elliptical Marquee Tool made drawing the oval selection and creating the vignette effect easy. But what if we need to draw a circular selection? We'll look at that next!

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