Unlock The Full Power Of Basic Selections In Photoshop

Full Power Of Basic Selections: The "Intersect With Selection" Option

First, let's go back up to the Options Bar to see where we can find the "Intersect With Selection" option, and then we'll see how to use it. Again looking at our four little yet powerful icons, the "Intersect With Selection" icon is the one on the right:

Just as with the "Add To Selection" and "Subtract From Selection" options, this one also has a handy keyboard shortcut so you don't have to keep going up to the Options Bar to access it. The keyboard shortcut is Shift+Alt (Win) / Shift+Option (Mac). So just as a quick keyboard shortcut summary:

• Shift = Add To Selection
• Alt (Win) / Option (Mac) = Subtract From Selection
• Shift+Alt (Win) / Shift+Option (Mac) = Intersect With Selection

Now that we know where it is in the Options Bar and how to quickly access it with the keyboard shortcut, what does the "Intersect With Selection" option do? For the answer to that, let's take a look at this new shape here:

Here we have two red crescent shapes, one on the left and one on the right, with an empty white area in between them. Let's say we needed to select that empty white area. We could try to use the Lasso tool, but unless you're talented at drawing perfect circles, good luck. We could use the Magic Wand tool here, since the area we want to select is solid white, but what if it wasn't? What if it was a full color photo and we needed to create a selection in that shape? The Magic Wand tool would probably be useless to us in that case. So what to do?

Well, Photoshop has a basic selection tool that's built for selecting round objects, the Elliptical Marquee Tool, so let's try that.

First, I'll select it from the Tools palette:

Then, with my Elliptical Marquee Tool selected, I'm going to draw a circular selection around that first shape on the left. As I drag, I'm going to hold down my Shift key to constrain my selection to a perfect circle:

Now I have that left shape selected, but I also have the white area in the middle selected, and my goal is to select only that white area in the middle. Let's see, I could try the "Add To Selection" option while dragging out another selection around the shape on the right:

Nope, that didn't work. All it did was put a selection around both shapes. Maybe I could try dragging a selection around the shape on the right using the "Subtract From Selection" option:

Nope, that didn't work either. The "Subtract From Selection" option was able to give me a perfect selection around the shape on the left, but that's still not what I wanted. Time to try the final option, Intersect With Selection.

The way "Intersect With Selection" works is that it looks at the initial selection you made and the selection you're currently dragging out, and keeps only the area where both selections overlap, or "intersect". So if, for example, I was to drag a circular selection around the shape on the left, and then drag another circular selection around the shape on the right using the "Intersect With Selection" option, what I'd end up with is a selection around only that white empty space between them where the two selections would overlap. Which, come to think of it, is exactly what I want!

Let's try it out. With my shape on the left already selected, and using the Elliptical Marquee Tool, I'm going to use the keyboard shortcut Shift+Alt (Win) / Shift+Option (Mac) and drag out a second selection around the shape on the right, causing the area in between the shapes to overlap. If you look in the bottom right corner of the mouse cursor (circled in red below), you can see a small "x", indicating that I'm using the "Intersect With Selection" option:

As with the previous two options we looked at, once you've begun dragging out your selection, there's no need to continue holding down the Shift and Alt/Option keys.

Using "Intersect With Selection", I now have the shape on the right also selected, and we can see that both selections overlap around the white space between them, which is the area I want to select. All I have to do now is release my mouse button, and Photoshop will select only that white area in the middle where my selections intersected:

And there we have it. Using that "Intersect With Selection" option, selecting the white area between the two shapes was easy.

We're now armed with the full power of basic selections in Photoshop. Not only can we make new selections, we can add to existing selections, subtract areas from existing selections, and intersect selections to easily grab the area where they overlap. We've arrived at our full potential. The world is within our grasp. The sky's the limit. The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades. The..... okay, I'll stop now.