Photoshop Elements 8 for Windows: 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?

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 (Free Rotate Layer). If you want to select a block, circle, or oval from your image, the Marquee tools are the way to go. As the winners of the Most Frequently Used Selection Tools award, they get top spot in the Selection area of the Editor's Tools panel. 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 Tools panel to activate it.

   The Marquee tool is the little dotted rectangle right below the Eyedropper icon in a single-row Tools panel, or below the Hand tool if you have two rows. (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 Tools panel's pop-out menu for the Marquee tools, choose the rectangle or the ellipse to set the shape.

   

   Figure 5-2. To make a perfectly circular or square selection, hold down the Shift key while you drag. You can ...