Photoshop Tutorials : Lesson # 10: Making simple selections

Photoshop enables selections of elliptical, rectangular and freehand shapes to be chosen. These selections can then be cut, copied, duplicated, erased, rotated, moved or pasted elsewhere. They can also have their opacity and other attributes changed.

 

Making a rectangular selection

1. Select the marquee tool (see right) from the toolbox (or press M on the keyboard);
2. To make the selection, position the pointer in the top left corner of the part of the image for selection;
3. Drag the mouse diagonally over the required area;
4. Release the mouse button. 

NB The dotted white border is called the “selection border”. 

 

Making an elliptical selection 

1. Select the elliptical tool (see right). This is found by keeping the mouse button  pressed down while pointing at the marquee tool and then then dragging along to the elliptical tool which appears in the submenu;
2. Drag mouse (button down) to select area.

 Redrawing the selection

1. Deselect the selection by clicking the mouse button outside of the selected area. Then reselect.

 Deleting the selection

1. Press the backspace key. See Erasing duplicated selections for details on how to change the resultant background colour.