Photoshop Elements 6: The Missing Manual

Selecting Rectangular and Elliptical Areas

Selecting your whole picture is all well and good, but many times your reason for making a selection is precisely because you don't want to make changes to the whole image. How do you select just part of the picture?

Well, the easiest way is to use the Marquee tools. You already met the Rectangular Marquee tool back in Chapter 3, in the section on cropping (Cropping Your Image to an Exact Size). If you want to select a block of your image or a circle or an oval from it, the Marquee tools are the way to go. As the winners of "Most Frequently Used Selection Tools," they get top spot in the Selection area of the Editor's Toolbox. You can modify how they work, like telling them to create a square instead of a rectangle, as explained in Figure 5-2.

To use the Marquee tools to make a selection:

1. Press M or click the Marquee tool's icon in the Toolbox to activate it.

   The Marquee tool is the little dotted square right below the Eyedropper icon. (Or it may appear as a little dotted oval, if you used the Elliptical Marquee tool last.)

2. Choose the Shape you want to draw: rectangle or ellipse.

   In the Toolbox pop-out menu for the Marquee tools, choose the rectangle or the ellipse to set the shape.

3. Choose a feather value if you want one.

   Feathering makes the edges of your selection softer or fuzzier for better blending. See the box on The Magic Wand for a look at how feathering (and anti-aliasing) work.

4. Drag in your image to make your selection.

   Wherever you initially ...