Why select?

In Photoshop, we have plenty of options to select.
But why and when should we select?
These are the questions I’ll try to answer.
We select a part of a picture when we want to change only that portion of the image.
For example the color or brightness.
A second example is when you want to combine a part of a photo with another photo.
In brief.
If you want edit or copy only part of a photo, first select that part.

Select / Deselect

To select a part of the picture, we use one of the many selection tools that Photoshop has.
For example, the “Rectangular Selection”.
Select this tool in the tool bar and click and drag in the photo on the section you want to select.
Release the mouse, you will see the stripes on marquee move in the picture.
The part of the picture that is in the bounding box is selected.
The portion that falls outside, is not selected.

To deselect a selection, click the “Select” button in the menu bar and choose “Deselect” from the drop-down menu. The fastest way to deselect something is indeed the Ctrl + D key on your keyboard.
If you have deleted a selection and want to re-apply, then click the “Select” button in the menu bar and choose “Reselect” in the drop-down menu or click the shortcut Ctrl + Shift + D on your keyboard . As long as you have made no new selection, Photoshop will apply the old selection back.

Select all

If you want to select everything in your picture, click “Select” in the menu bar and select “All” in the drop-down menu.
This can be used, for example, when you take this picture to copy into another picture.

 

Hide Selection

When a selection is in your way, you can temporarily hide it. Especially in complex selections, this will sometimes be the case.
To hide a selection, click the button “View” in the menu bar and click “Extras” in the drop-down menu.
The hotkey for this is Ctrl + H on your keyboard.
To get back this display, repeat this action.

Marquee

As I told you previously, we have a number of tools in Photoshop to make a photo selection.
For this we have two methods. You have the manual method and you have the automatic method.
An example of a tool, in which we use the manual method, is the “rectangular bounding box” tool.
With the “Rectangular selection” tool, we make selections in the form of a rectangle, or in the form of a square.
To select a rectangular shape, click and drag in the photo, until you’ve reached the desired size.
To form a square, click and drag on the picture and without releasing the mouse button, hold the Shift key on your keyboard pressed.
When you have reached the desired size, release the mouse button first and then the Shift key.

There is also a second way to make a square selection.
Click on the downward pointing arrow next to the “Style” box in the Options bar and select “Fixed Ratio”. In the “W” and “H” you give the same values, and the width and height will be maintained at the same proportion (1), while you click and drag.

This aside. With the second option in this drop-down menu “Fixed Size”, we can enter a preset value for the marquee. Example, width 200, height 300. The only thing you still need to do, is a single click in the image and the bounding box with the given dimensions will appear in the photo.
The value you enter in the headings is always in pixels.

When we have selected a selection tool, no matter what, we have four buttons in the options bar (2).
The first button “New Selection” is selected for a new selection.
The second button “Add to Selection” will be a selection to add to an existing selection.
The third button “Subtract from Selection” will remove a selection from an existing selection.
And the last button “Intersect with selection”, we use it when we want to retain only a part of the selection. With the selection tool, click and drag over everything you want to retain.

Another tip:
When you select something with the tool “Rectangular Marquee”, it is always a selection from one corner to another corner.
However, if you want to make a selection from the center of the rectangle, first click on the position where the center of the selection should be, and drag the mouse pointer.
Hold the Alt key on your keyboard pressed.
You will see how the marquee moves.
If you have reached the desired size, release the mouse button first and then the Alt key.

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