How to Use the Basic Selection and Marquees Tools in Photoshop Elements 15
During this Photoshop Elements 15 tutorial video, we will cover the basics of selection and use of the marquee tool. We will demonstrate how to make a selection, how to deselect, add, subtract and intersect selections, how to make a fixed ratio selection, how to invert a selection and how to to add an effect to a selection.
Hello again and welcome back to our course on PSE 15.
This section is the first of several, about half a dozen sections, on selection. If you’ve used a relatively recent version of PSE and you’re very happy with the selection tools, you know which tools to use when and how and why, then you can probably skip this and the next few sections. If you haven’t used them before or if you’re not quite sure of, for example, which tool to use in which situation then I think you’re going to find the next few sections pretty useful.
I pointed out earlier in the course why we do selection. Very often we only need to work on part of an image and sometimes we want to take apart one image and use it elsewhere. So we need to be able to select part of an image. And the range of tools for selection in PSE is now pretty extensive. Why are there so many tools? Well selection can be done on a number of bases.
For instance in this first section we’re just going to take a regular shape out of a picture and we’re just going to do it visually and say well I want that rectangular part of the picture, for example. But in other situations we may make a selection based on the color of objects in the image or perhaps finding a defined edge. So if I wanted to cut this sheep out how would I select the sheep? Would I draw around the edge? Or could I perhaps rely on the difference in color between the sheep and the field that it’s standing in?
So we have some standard selection tools that we’re going to start with but then we have other selection tools that are based on things like color. Once we’ve made selections we have various tools to improve those selections and then various ways of working with them, such as adding to selections, saving them for later use and so on. So there’s a lot to know about selections and they are a very important part of using the PSE 15 Editor.
The first set of tools we’re going to look at then are what are called the Marquee tools. These are basically the simplest selection tools that we have in PSE 15. You need to know how to use these but also in using and explaining these I can show you some of the other common features of selection tools that you’re going to need to know about.
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The selection tools are in this Select group at the top here, the Marquee tools are the top right. There are two of them. There is a rectangular marquee and there is an elliptical marquee. Let’s go with the rectangular marquee to begin with.
All I need to do is to click on the image and drag to a rectangular shape and I’ve made a selection. You can see the marching ants. And just by way of a quick demonstration. If I wanted to apply an effect here, supposing I wanted to apply say the Lizard Skin Effect here it would be applied only to the selection now. Now I actually don’t want to do that at the moment so let me undo that and close the Effects panel again.
One of the most important things to know is how to deselect. On a PC you only need to hit the Escape key. There is a Select menu and one of the items on there is Deselect. That gives you a keyboard shortcut of Control-D on a PC. It’s actually Command-D on a Mac and that deselects.
In the Tool Options one of the options in the second group is that one which is New Selection. And when I drew the rectangle just now I was making a new selection. If I wanted to add to that selection I could click the second option there which is Add, draw another rectangle and my selection now comprises both of those rectangles.
If I wanted to subtract from the selection, if I draw yet a third rectangle this will be subtracted from the other two. So the shape that I’ve got now it’s quite an irregular shape. It’s the original rectangle minus a bit. And it’s the second rectangle minus a bit. So in that way you can build up pretty complex selections.
The last option there is an intersection. So let me deselect this. I’m going to press Control-D on my keyboard. Now I’m going to draw a New. I’m going to select that option Intersect with Selection. I’m going to draw another one. And the selection is the area where those two intersected.
This set of controls is common to most of the selection tools.
One other very important point here is that if I make a selection, let me once again make a rectangular selection on this image. Having made the selection if you look carefully at the cursor, while the cursor is that shape if I click and hold I can move the selection around to position it more accurately to where I need it to be.
Let me deselect again. And in fact when it comes to making a selection it doesn’t have to be completely freehand. I might choose, for example, to have a selection with a fixed ratio. The ratio here, for example, is 1:1. Supposing I made that 1:2. So that’s width 1, height 2. As I draw my selection the ratio will be constrained to being 1:2.
Once again let me deselect. And if I go back to normal, if while I’m making my selection I hold the Shift key down, as I draw my rectangle it’ll actually come out as a square. And following on from that if I switch to the Elliptical Marquee tool and start a new selection I can draw an ellipse which is straightforward enough. Let me cancel that. If I hold the Shift key down while I draw the ellipse I’ll get a circle.
Let’s now look at one or two of the other options that are available. I’m going to stick with the picture of the sheep and an elliptical marquee and I’m going to draw an elliptical marquee around the sheep. And I’m going to apply that Lizard Skin Effect again. Okay note carefully that you can still see the marching ants around the edge of the selection. Let me undo that and go to the Select menu and I’m going to invert the selection.
So I’m going to click on Inverse and now it’s everything outside that original selection that is selected. So if I apply Lizard Skin now it’s applied to the inverse of the selection. Let me undo that and I’m going to invert the selection again so that I’m back to the original.
Now what I’m going to do is to copy this selection to the clipboard. It’s just a straightforward copy. I can either use a keyboard shortcut or up here, Edit, Copy. That’s copied to the clipboard. One of the options we haven’t looked at at all so far is how to create a new image from the contents of the clipboard. Let’s do that now.
File, New, Image from Clipboard. And I have a new image based on the contents of the clipboard which is the selection that I copied just now. Let me zoom out just a little. Now look carefully at that selection and the edges. I’m going to go back to the original image again. What I’m going to do now is to make a new selection and this time I’m going to feather the edges. I’m going to feather the edges by 54 pixels.
So I’m going to make another marquee selection, roughly the same size and shape as the previous one. Once again copy it to the clipboard and once again create a new image on the basis of that new selection. What you see now is a selection with feathered edges. And you can see the effect the extreme softening of the edges of the selection, which can be a very useful effect to be able to achieve and use.
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There are two other options to mention here which relate not only to the marquee tools but to selection tools in general. One of them is Refine Edge which we’re going to look at later on in the course. And the other one is Anti-aliasing. As part of your photographic knowledge you may know about anti-aliasing and you may also be familiar with it if you’ve worked with computer graphics before. If you want to find out about what anti-aliasing is and does there’s a very good section in the Elements PDF that explains it.
And here is that section which explains anti-aliasing and feathering. And I suggest that you read through that carefully if you’ve not come across these terms before. There is also further information on the Adobe website in that section that I showed you on terminology.
But that’s the end of this section. I’ll see you in the next one.
Simon Calder
Chris “Simon” Calder was working as a Project Manager in IT for one of Los Angeles’ most prestigious cultural institutions, LACMA.He taught himself to use Microsoft Project from a giant textbook and hated every moment of it. Online learning was in its infancy then, but he spotted an opportunity and made an online MS Project course - the rest, as they say, is history!
