Making a Selection

posted by Liz

I thought I'd go over some "beginner" stuff because not everyone who visits this site is a Photoshop expert and even those of us who are more experienced sometimes miss things along the way. One of the most essential skills, as a designer, is to be able to cleanly cut objects out of your stock/source photos.

These are my 5 favorite ways to make a selection in Photoshop, starting from simplest to most complex.

1. Marquee Selection Tools
Pretty basic. More for making something like, say, a glossy button than cutting a shape out of a photo. The Elliptical and Rectangular Marquee tools are the quickest, easiest ways to make a selection. Click and drag. By holding down Shift to add to your selection, or Option to subtract from it, you can make complex selection shapes using even these basic tools.

2. The Magic Wand
The Magic Wand is a wonderful time-saver when cutting something out of a document with high contrast because it makes selections based on color.

Hold down Shift and keep clicking around until your selection is complete. If you accidentally include something you didn't want, hit Command+Z or hold down Option instead of Shift to deselect an area.

Tip: Raise or lower the Tolerance value in the top toolbar to increase or decrease your color range. This will allow you to accept or exclude more colors and get a better selection for your document.

Magic Wand


3. The Lasso Tools
Here we've got the Lasso, the Polygonal Lasso and the Magnetic Lasso tools. The Lasso tool is not for the artist with the shaky hand, but it makes a quick, though rough, selection. The Polygonal Lasso tool is one of Adam's favorites because it lets you just happily click around your shape bit by bit and you can be as specific or non-specific as you want.

The Magnetic Lasso tool is similar to the Wand Tool in that you will get the best results if the object you are selecting is in high contrast to the background. Meaning, don't use the Magnetic Lasso to cut a strawberry out of a pile of strawberries. But it can work wonders with a strawberry on a white background.

Magnetic Lasso Tool


If it isn't making anchor points quickly enough or in the right spots, you can make your own manually by clicking your mouse as you go along.

Tip: Hitting Delete will back up one anchor point on either the polygonal or magnetic lasso tool. Escape will exit the selection entirely. Also, make sure you fine tune your lasso tools to the document you're working on. Don't assume the default settings will always do the best job.

4. Quick Mask
Quick Mask is good for a document that doesn't have high contrast. Put the document in Quick Mask mode either by pressing Q or clicking on the button at the bottom of your toolbar.



This mode reverts you to the default black and white. All you have to do is paint with a brush in black around the shape you want to select. Switch to white to erase if you accidentally cross over and mask part of your object. Change your brush type and size to your needs.

The default mode for quick mask is to show the areas you are masking in 50% red. You can double-click on the Quick Mask button to change this. If you change the setting to show selected areas instead of masked areas, you'll want to paint over the object you're cutting out instead of the background.

Tip: I've discovered that you can use the Move Tool in Quick Mask Mode by clicking and dragging from one of the corners of your document. The arrow will act as a sort of crosshair and you can quickly eliminate a chunk of the background.

Brushing in Quick Mask Mode


To see your selection at any time, simply exit Quick Mask mode and it will show you what you've selected.

5. Pen Tool
The Pen tool is one of the most difficult tools to grasp, but it's extremely handy in both Photoshop and Illustrator. This is my personal favorite because I'm sort-of-a-little-bit anal retentive and, for me, this method is as precise as it gets.

You draw using Bezier Curves, which can be complicated if you're not used to it. Make sure you change the default Pen setting at the top from Shape Layers to Paths, otherwise you'll simply draw a shape over your object rather than creating a path around it.

Setting the Pen Tool to Paths


Without getting too complicated...

If you click the Pen tool in one spot and then click in another, it will draw a straight line between the two points. If you want a perfectly horizontal or vertical line, hold down Shift when clicking the second anchor point.

If you click and drag the Pen tool, you'll create a directional handle that shows you which direction your curve will flow. Click and drag in a new spot to complete the curve. Practice will show you how to be more precise with this tool, but the best part of this is that you can go back with the Direct Selection tool to relocate the anchor points and also toggle the handles to adjust the shapes of the curves you've created, so you really don't have to be that good at it. (If anyone is interested in going into more detail with the Pen tool, let me know.)

Drawing a Bezier Curve


After you've made your first curve, hold down Option, click on the anchor point you left off with and drag it to create a fresh directional point. Release Option and click and drag a little ways ahead to complete your second segment. Continue outlining your object. To close the path, connect the last segment to the beginning anchor point. You'll see an open circle appear over it, which indicates that you're closing the path.

To turn your path into a selection, go to the Paths palette and click the Load Path as a Selection button.

Tip: Once you've finished drawing the path, if you feel that you didn't make enough anchor points to really hug your object, look under the Pen tool in the toolbar for the Add Anchor Point tool. Simply click on the path to create an anchor point. Use the Delete Anchor Point tool to get rid of extra points.

Bonus Tips:
* Always zoom in to create a more precise selection.
* Once you've made a selection, it's sometimes a good idea to feather it (Select>Modify>Feather) by at least 1 or 2 pixels to avoid a hard edge to your cutout.
* A quick trick for setting this selected object on its own layer is Command+J.

This is not an exclusive list. You can also select things using Extract (which I dislike with a vengeance), Paths or even Channels. However, using Channels is complicated and will require a tutorial all to itself.