Photoshop Elements 8 for Windows: The Missing Manual

Changing and Moving Selections

Now that you know all about making selections, it's time to learn some of the finer points about using and manipulating them. Elements gives you several handy options for changing the areas you've selected and for moving images around once they're selected. You can even save a tough selection so you don't have to do that again.

Inverting a Selection

One thing you often want to do with a selection is invert it. That means telling Elements, "Hey, you know the area I've selected? I want you to select everything except that area."

Why would you want to do that? Sometimes it's easier to select what you don't want. For example, suppose you have an object with a complicated outline, like the building in Figure 5-18. Say you want to use just the building in a scrapbook of your trip to Europe; it's going to be difficult to select. But the sky is just one big block of color. It's a lot faster to select the sky with the Magic Wand than to try to get an accurate selection of the building.

Figure 5-18. Top: Say you want to make some adjustments to just this building. You could spend half an hour meticulously selecting all that Gothic detail, or just select the sky with a couple of clicks of the Magic Wand and invert your selection to get the building. Here, the sky has the marching ants around it to show that it's the active selection—but that's not what you want. Bottom: ...