Photoshop Elements 13: The Missing Manual

Chapter 5. Making Selections

One of Elements’ most impressive talents is its ability to let you select part of an image and make changes to only that area. Selecting something tells Elements, “This is what I want to work on—don’t touch the rest of my image.”

You can select a whole image or any part of it. Using selections, you can fine-tune images in very sophisticated ways: Change the color of just one rose in a bouquet, for instance, or change your nephew’s festive purple hair back to something his grandparents would appreciate. Graphics pros will tell you that good selections make the difference between shoddy, amateurish work and a slick, professional job.

Elements includes a bunch of different Selection tools. You can draw a rectangular or circular selection with the Marquee tools; paint to create a selection with the Selection Brush; or just drag in your photo with the Quick Selection tool and let Elements figure out the exact boundaries of your selection. The Transform Selection command lets you resize selections in a snap, and the Refine Edge dialog box is a great help with difficult selections like hair and fur. The Content-Aware Move tool lets you move an object to a different location in your photo, while it analyzes the image to create plausible new material to fill in the hole where the object was originally. And Elements 13 gives you an interesting new tool for adjusting your selections after you’ve made them: the Refine Selection Brush, which lets you easily reshape ...