Unlock The Full Power Of Basic Selections In Photoshop
Free Adobe Photoshop Photo Editing Tutorials At Photoshop Essentials.com
Written by Steve Patterson, Photoshop Essentials.com
In this Photoshop tutorial, we're going to look at how to get the most out of Photoshop's basic selection tools, such as the Marquee tools or the Lasso tool. If all you've been using them for is to make a new selection every time, you've been missing out on their full potential. We're going to see how you can add to an existing selection, how to subtract an area from an existing selection, and even how to intersect two selections and grab the area that overlaps. Once you become familiar with the full power of basic selections, they'll seem a whole lot more useful to you.
Let's start by taking a look at how to add to an existing selection.
Full Power Of Basic Selections: Adding To A Selection
To keep things simple, I have a fairly basic shape open in my Document Window:
I want to select this shape using the most common selection tool in all of Photoshop, the Rectangular Marquee Tool, so I'm going to grab it from my Tools palette:
I could also press M on my keyboard to quickly access it.
Now, let's say all I know how to do is make a new selection with this tool. Hmm, this is going to be a bit tricky. I'll start by dragging a selection around the bottom half of the shape. That should be easy enough:
There we go, looks good. The bottom half is selected. There's still that square part in the top right though, so I'll just draw out another selection, this time around that top square. Since I'm selecting a square, I'm going to start from the top left corner of the shape and then hold down my Shift key as I drag to constrain my selection to a perfect square:
There we go, the top of the shape is now selected. Except... wait a minute. What happened to my original selection around the bottom part of the shape? It's gone!
Yep, it's gone. I lost my original selection the moment I began dragging out my second selection, and that's the default behavior of selections in Photoshop. Once you start dragging out another selection, your existing one disappears, which means there's no way I can select this shape. It's beyond the power of Photoshop to select something this complex. Oh well, thanks for joining us.
Okay, seriously, there most certainly is a way to select this shape, although we could never do it by dragging out a new selection each time, as we've already seen. What we need to be able to do is add a selection to our initial selection, and if this is something new to you, you're about to wonder how you ever managed to work in Photoshop without knowing how to do this.
