Part III
Selections, Layers,
and Channels
IN THIS PART
Chapter 9
Creating Selections
Chapter 10
All about Layers
Chapter 11
Channels
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259
CHAPTER
Creating Selections
IN THIS CHAPTER
The secrets of the Select menu
How to use the selection tools
Making your selection perfect
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ventually, you’ll want to make changes to just a part of your photo.
Whitening teeth, swapping backgrounds, or targeting areas of a photo
to leave in color even as you turn the rest to black and white are just
a few examples of things you can do by selecting a portion of your photo.
Knowing the different selection tools that are available to you in Photoshop
and how and when to use each is integral to making these types of changes
effectively.
When you create a selection in a photo, it allows you to change the area
inside the selection without affecting any other part of the photo. You’ll
sometimes hear selections called selection masks, because they effectively
mask the unselected portions of a photo from the changes being made. You

also can use selections to create masks and paths, enhancing your selective
creativity even more.
Before I show you how each selection tool works, I cover the basics, includ-
ing the Select menu and the options available. After I show you the ins and
outs of all the selection tools, I show you how to put the finishing touches
on your selection and finally how to output your selections as masks.
The Select Menu
The Select menu, as shown in Figure 9.1, has several options that help you
create and use a selection. Some of these options are holdovers from before
the powerful selection tools like the Quick Selection tool and Refine Edge
dialog box were available. These are options that you won’t use very often, if
at all. Other options are indispensable, and being familiar with these options
gives you more power in utilizing the selections you create.
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FIGURE 9.1
The Select menu
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Select All: Would you like to select everything? This could be a selection around your
entire image, or a selection around everything in a selected layer. Ctrl/Ô+A is the hotkey
for selecting all, and it’s a handy one to memorize, because this is a hotkey that is univer-
sal, working in many applications as well as Photoshop.
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Deselect: If you are not familiar with the Deselect option, you have probably been
really frustrated more than once at those marching ants that just don’t seem to go away.
Ctrl/Ô+D is another useful hotkey to know, immediately deselecting everything.
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Reselect: Whoops! Did you use the Deselect option too soon? Choose the Reselect option
to bring your selection back. Although you can use the Undo option to bring your selec-

tion back immediately, you can use the Reselect option even after you’ve made other
changes to your image in the interim. Although this option brings back the latest selection
as long as your document is open, it’s certainly not the best option for preserving your
selection—make another selection, and the one you want is gone. If you want to preserve
a selection for later use, Save Selection is a much better option.
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Inverse: Sometimes using the selection tools to select what you don’t want selected is
much easier than selecting what you do want selected. Blurring the background behind a
person in an image is a good example of this; it’s much easier to select the person than the
entire background. When this is the case, select what you don’t want selected; the inverse
option reverses the areas that are selected in your image.
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All Layers: If you have two or more layers in the Layers panel, click this option to select
all of them at once.
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Chapter 9: Creating Selections
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Deselect Layers: This deselects any layers that are selected.
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Similar Layers: Use this option to select layers that are similar to one another—all text
layers or all fill layers, for instance.
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Color Range…: This option is similar to the Magic Wand tool, both of which I cover later
in this chapter.
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Refine Mask…: If a selection is active in your image, this option is actually Refine Edge in
the menu. Refining the edges of either a selection or a mask uses the same dialog box and
is a similar process for each. It is covered later in this chapter.
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Modify: You can modify your selection in several different ways, most of which are simi-
lar to using the Refine Edge dialog box:
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Border: This is the only Modify option that isn’t also found in the Refine Edge dialog
box. It allows you to select, rather than entire objects, just the border of that object.
After making a selection, click Select ➪ Modify ➪ Border, and the Border Selection dia-
log box appears, as shown in Figure 9.2. You can type the size of the border in pixels
ranging from 1 to 200, and the border is created, centered on the original selection.
The border selection is soft-edged, feathering out from the original selection, as you
can see in the effect created using the Border Selection tool in Figure 9.2.
FIGURE 9.2
A Border Selection could be used to create special effects such as this “man in
the moon.”
On the Web Site
You can access the JPEG of the moon as well as the final PSD file used in Figure 9.2 by downloading both ver-
sions from the Web site. n
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Smooth: This reduces the “hills and valleys” in your selection by smoothing the edges
of the selection based on the pixel value you enter.
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Expand: This increases the overall size of the selection by expanding it the number of
pixels indicated.
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Contract: This decreases the overall size of the selection by contracting it the number
of pixels indicated.
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Feather: This makes the specified pixels on the edges of the selection gradually trans-

parent. This allows changes you make to the selection to blend with the surrounding
areas, whether you apply an adjustment to the selection or create a mask with the
selection.
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Grow: This expands your selection based on color. The areas that are adjacent to the
selection that fall within the tolerance range specified in the Magic Wand tool (covered
later in this chapter) also are selected.
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Similar: Like the Grow option, this also expands your selection based on color, but using
the entire image rather than just the adjacent areas.
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Transform Selection: This allows you to scale and rotate your selection.
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Edit in Quick Selection Mask Mode: Quick Mask mode uses a red overlay called a ruby-
lith that can be changed using a brush to make precise refinements to your selection. It
can be accessed more quickly from the Toolbox. The Quick Selection Mask is covered in
greater detail later in this chapter.
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Load Selection: This allows you to reload any saved selections.
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Save Selection: This option allows you to save the current selection and retrieve it at any
time, even after the file is closed and reopened (provided that the file has been saved as a
.psd). You can save as many selections as you need to.
Using the Selection Tools
There are as many shapes and sizes of potential selections as there are images. In order to make
selection as simple and efficient as possible, Photoshop provides several tools, as shown in Figure
9.3, that can be used to make specific types of selections. These tools can be used in conjunction
with each other for even more versatility. With the advancements made to the tools, options, and
refinements over the last few versions of Photoshop, selection has gone from a tedious process to
an enjoyable one.

Cross-Ref
As I teach you about selection tools in this chapter, keep in mind that some selections are easier to make using
a specific color channel rather than the full image. This is a more advanced concept, so you can read about
Color Channels in Chapter 11. n
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Chapter 9: Creating Selections
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FIGURE 9.3
The selection tools in the Toolbox
Quick Selection tool
The Quick Selection tool is the best selection tool in the Photoshop Toolbox. It’s been part of the
Photoshop repertoire since CS3, and it easily trumps all the other selection tools. It has a new look
in CS5, but it does the same remarkable work.
The Quick Selection tool works by selecting adjacent areas that are similar in color and texture to
the area that you are dragging over. It works well for almost anything, because as you drag the
selection roughly around the edges of the area you want to select, the tool automatically finds the
edges of your selection and creates a more precise selection than you could make freehand.
Because it can be used to fine-tune selections made by the other selection tools, I show you how to
use it first.
Quick Selection tool options
When you click the Quick Selection tool, the Options bar above the document window displays
the available options, as shown in Figure 9.4. Familiarizing yourself with these options before you
use the tool helps you to get the most out of this tool’s capability.
FIGURE 9.4
The Options for the Quick Selection tool
Tool presets
New, Add, Subtract
Brush picker
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Tool presets: You can save and retrieve your favorite tool settings using this drop-down

list. Click the little black arrow to see a menu of available options.
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New selection: When this option is highlighted, every time you drag the selection brush,
you create a new selection. As you use the Quick Selection tool, it begins with the Add
new selection option and automatically changes to the Add to selection option after your
first selection.
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Add to selection: With this option highlighted, everything you select is added to the cur-
rent selection. This makes it easy to zoom in and do the detail work after the initial selec-
tion is made.
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Subtract from selection: With this option highlighted, you can subtract areas from the
current selection.
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Brush picker: This sets the size and style of your selection brush. When using the selec-
tion tools, size is all that really matters, but it can make a difference in your selection. A
larger brush has a larger tolerance and is less likely to find the more detailed edges.
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Sample all layers: With this option checked, the Quick Selection tool uses color and tex-
tures from all available layers to determine the edges of your selection.
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Auto-Enhance: This option smoothes out the edges and reduces the blockiness of your
selection, automatically performing some of the refinements so you don’t have to, using
the Refine Edge dialog box. It is time-consuming and doesn’t give you any control, how-
ever, so it isn’t usually the best option.
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Refine Edge: Refining the edge of a selection is the finish work that perfects your selec-

tion. This option is covered later in this chapter.
Using the Quick Selection tool
In the photo used in this example, you can see that the background is very distracting, so I am
going to select the boy and blur the background so that the boy is clearly the subject of this photo.
See how quickly and easily you can select an area in your photo by following these steps:
1. Click the Quick Selection tool in the Toolbox, or press W.
2. Click the Brush Picker and then choose a size and brush style from the Quick
Selection options menu at the top of the preview window, as shown in Figure 9.5.
The size and softness of the brush determine the detail of the edge selection. For large,
hard edges, your brush can be quite large, making the selection faster. To fine-tune
smaller areas, use a smaller brush size.
Tip
Use the brackets ([ and ]) to quickly reduce and expand your brush size. n
3. Drag a rough outline around the area you want to select.
As I drag around the boy in Figure 9.6, the selection outline is adhering to the edges of
his body. You don’t need to make this selection continuously; you can add to and sub-
tract from the selection as you go.
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Chapter 9: Creating Selections
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FIGURE 9.5
The brush picker for the Quick Selection tool
FIGURE 9.6
The Quick Selection tool uses color and texture to define a selection.
On the Web Site
You can try your hand at creating this selection by downloading Figure 9-6 from the Web site. n
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4. Use the Add to Selection and Subtract from Selection tools to fine-tune your selection.

Zoom in on hard-to-define areas and reduce your brush size to make the smaller selec-
tions. If you select too much, use the Subtract from Selection to take the extra area out.
That is the beginning of creating a selection with the Quick Selection tool. From beginning to end,
it took less than five minutes to select the boy off the background of the sample image.
Magic Wand tool
Nested with the Quick Selection tool is the Magic Wand tool. The Magic Wand tool creates a selec-
tion by targeting areas that are the same color. Use this tool if the area you want to select is all a
similar color or colors. This works best, of course, if the areas that you don’t want selected are a
contrasting color.
Magic Wand tool options
Before using the Magic Wand tool, you should familiarize yourself with the options displayed
above the document window in the Options bar, as shown in Figure 9.7. Familiarizing yourself
with these options before you use the tool helps you to get the most out of this tool’s capability.
FIGURE 9.7
The Options for the Magic Wand tool
Tool presets
New, Add, Subtract, and Intersect
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Tool presets: You can save and retrieve your favorite tool settings using this drop-down
list. Click the little black arrow to see a menu of available options.
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New selection: When this option is highlighted, every time you drag the selection brush,
you create a new selection and the old selection disappears.
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Add to selection: With this option highlighted, everything you select is added to the cur-
rent selection. This makes it easy to do the detail work after the initial selection is made.
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Subtract from selection: With this option highlighted, you can subtract areas from the
current selection.
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Intersect with selection: This option selects only those areas that were in the first selec-
tion you made, as well as the second, and deselects anything that was selected only once.
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Tolerance: The tolerance level determines how many shades of the color you choose with
the Magic Wand are selected. A higher tolerance selects more shades; a lower tolerance
selects fewer. The level you set depends entirely on your photo.
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