Photoshop Elements 5: The Missing Manual

138 Photoshop Elements 5: The Missing Manual

Changing and Moving

Selections

To save a selection:

1. Make your selection. Then choose Select ➝ Save Selection, name your selec-

tion, and save it.

When you want to use the selection again, go to Select ➝ Load Selection, and

there it is, waiting for you.

NOTE When you save a feathered (page 117) selection, it’s almost impossible to change the

feather later on if you change your mind about how much feather you want. It’s easier to save the

hard-edged selection, load it, and then go to Select

➝ Feather to add a feather if you need one.

That way you can change the amount each time you use the selection, as long as you remember

not to save the change to the selection.

Making changes to a saved selection

It’s probably just as easy to start your selection over if you need to tweak a saved

selection, but it is possible to make changes if you want. This can save you some

time if your original selection was really tricky to create.

Say you’ve got a full-length photo of somebody, and you’ve created and saved a

selection of the person’s face (called, naturally enough, “Face”). Now, imagine that

after applying a filter to the selection, you decide it would look silly to change only

the face and not the person’s hands, too.

So you want to add the hands to your saved selection. There are a couple of ways

to do this.

The simplest is just to load up “Face,” activate your ...