Using the Photoshop Selection tools and applying various effects

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Using the Photoshop Selection tools and applying various effects

This tutorial will walk you through how to use the various selection tools. It will also introduce you to functions available through the “Select” menu. We will also go through some of the various effects you can achieve.

I will be using the image below for the examples. Feel free to use it.

Selection Basics

This is the most basic of the tools; it creates a rectangle or square selection. There are numerous tricks to use to “tweak” your selection though.

1. First off find the tool on your toolbar. Select it.

2. You should see a bar appear along the top of your screen this is your options bar for this tool. We will be using the “Feather” function and the “Intersect” (far left, boxes) function.

3. Now, take your cursor and “click & drag” over an area of the picture you wish to select.

Simple, right? There’s a lot this tool is capable of.

Now, holding down [Shift] will make Photoshop keep your selection in a square. Holding down [Alt] (or [Option] if your on a Apple Computer) will start your selection from the middle. The “Feather” function will make the edges of your selection have a sort of Blur, or Fuzziness.

This image below was done completely with 1 simple feathered selection, then Drag& Drop’ed on the other image!

This tool is nearly identical to the rectangular Marquee Tool; it simply creates Circles and Ovals! Same functions and everything. Play around with it.

Here’s the same example as above, just done with the Elliptical Marquee Tool. I also decreased opacity.

The Magic Wand

The Magic Wand is a tool used to select a chunk of an image witch does not differ in color. It appears in many programs however; with Photoshop it becomes very powerful for generating effects.

Select your Magic Wand tool on your toolbar; above your toolbar you should see something like this.

Tolerance is the amount of difference between either colours or contrast that the tool will select.

Find a spot on the picture that has a large chunk of one color.

I selected the Red shaded area, this looks to be a rock. I used 72 Tolerance for this as the rock did differ in color slightly, as you can see it still didn’t select the darkest of areas, you can fix this by using “Feather” Go under the Select menu and find your “Feather” option, I had to use a 20 pixel feather to select all the rock and make the selection a bit softer, play around with it.

Using the magic wand you can take and remove parts of the image very fast and easy, combined with the Feather option it can be a very interesting effect.

This was done using the same as the last 2 examples, I just used the magic wand to delete some of the lighter areas of his face, and the effect is somewhat strange!

We will not be covering the Single Row Tool or the Single Column in a deep manner. These 2 tools simply select all the pixels in one row of the image, they are very rarely used.

Crop Tool

Unlike the normal crop command this tool allows you to select rotated crop selections.

I used the same technique used with the Rectangular Marquee tool to select the Jaguar’s head. I then rotated my selection by simply holding down the mouse button and dragging. Now, to crop the image simply click another tool on the toolbar. You will be prompted by Photoshop making sure you want to crop, click Crop!

My Final Image: Looks a lot cooler, very focused on the facial features.

The lasso tools make it easy to select only what you want, and nothing else. Take note that you can use the feather function to create interesting effects!

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