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 Photoshop tools, you can tell the program exactly which portion of the image you want to tinker with, right down to the pixel, if you so desire. This process is called making a selection.
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. You can also draw selections by hand, although that requires a bit of mouse prowess. True selection wisdom lies in learning which selection 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.
Selection Basics
What's so great about selections, anyway? Lots. After you make a selection, you can do all kinds of neat things with it, like:
Fill it with color or pixels from the image's background. Normally, the Edit→Fill command (Filling a Layer with Color) floods an entire layer with color, but by creating a selection first, you can color just that area. In CS5, you can use the Fill command in conjunction with a selection to delete a person from your photo as if they were never there (see Filling a Selection with Color).
Add an outline. You can add a stroke
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