Chapter 1. Making Selections
In This Chapter
Capturing selections with the Marquee tools
Roping selections with the Lasso tools
Picking up pixels with the Magic Wand tool
Selecting quickly to save time
No matter how much you know about Photoshop, if you can't make a good selection, your work will look like it belongs with the creatively (but poorly) composed images in those weekly tabloid rags. You know what I'm talking about — those pictures that go alongside headlines like "Bat Boy Wins Bake-Off" and "Woman with 16 Fingers Wins Typing Contest."
Note
Making accurate selections is the key to creating and editing images effectively so that the end result looks flawless. Fortunately, Photoshop offers a bevy of tools and techniques for creating selections, from the simple to the complex. Photoshop offers three basic methods of creating a selection: using a selection tool or method, using the Pen tool, or creating a mask.
In this chapter, I give you the foundation you need to use the selection and Pen tools. In fact, the rest of Book III covers these tools in detail. I cover the more complex method of masking in Book VI.
Defining Selections
The tools I discuss in this chapter require you to take a little piece of a larger image so that you can dig in and make some serious edits. Defining a selection means that you specify which part of the image you want to work with. Everything within a selection ...
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