Photoshop CC: The Missing Manual, 2nd Edition

Chapter 4. Selections: Choosing What to Edit

Life is all about making choices, and the time you spend in Photoshop is no exception. Perhaps the biggest decision you’ll make is which part of an image to edit—after all, your edits don’t have to affect the whole thing. Using a variety of tools, you can tell Photoshop exactly which portion of an image you want to tinker with, right down to the pixel, if you so desire. This process is called making a selection.

You can draw selections by hand, although that requires a bit of mouse (or digital drawing tablet) prowess. As you’ll learn in this chapter, Photoshop has a bunch of tools that you can use to create selections based on shape, color, and other attributes. And this version of the program sports a brand-new selection method called Focus Area, which lets you quickly select the part of your photo that’s in focus.

True selection wisdom lies in learning which tool to start with, how to use the tools together, and how to fine-tune your selections quickly and efficiently. The following pages will help you with all that and then some.