Photoshop CC: The Missing Manual

Selection Basics

What’s so great about selections, anyway? Lots. After you make a selection, you can do all kinds of neat things with the selection itself as well as the pixels that live inside it:

• Move it around. To move part of an image, you need to select it first. You can even move selections from one document to another, as discussed on Moving Selections. For example, a little head swapping is great fun after family reunions and breakups. If you want to stick your ex’s head onto a ballerina’s body, hop on over to Saving a Selection. You can scoot your selection around while you’re making it, too, in case you didn’t get it in the right spot at first (see the Tip on Tip).

• Resize or transform it. Need to change the size or shape of a selection before you manipulate the pixels inside it? No problem: Once you’ve made the selection, you can transform it into whatever size or shape you need (Creating a Border Selection). With this maneuver, Photoshop won’t reshape any pixels that are in the selected area; it just changes the shape of the selection itself. This trick is handy when you’re trying to select part of an image that’s in perspective, as shown on Transforming a Selection. Likewise, you can also transform the pixels you’ve selected, which is helpful when you’re slimming your subject (Super Slimmers).

• Fill it with color or pixels from the image’s background. Normally, the Edit→Fill command or a Fill layer floods an entire layer with color, but by creating a selection first, you ...