Photoshop® Elements 7 All-in-One For Dummies®

Chapter 12. Making Selections

In This Chapter

• Defining selections

• Creating selections with the Marquee tools

• Roping your selections with the Lasso tools

• Selecting pixels with the Magic Wand tool

• Using the Quick Selection tool tosave time

• Painting with the Selection Brush

Sometimes you get lucky, and what you capture in the camera's viewfinder is exactly what you want to edit, print, or share online. But at other times, you may want to work with just a portion of that image. Maybe you just need to adjust the contrast in a certain area. Or you want to combine part of one image with another. In these instances, you have to make a selection before you can go on to do the real editing work.

Being able to make accurate selections is a valuable skill. Fortunately, Elements offers an assortment of tools and techniques for making selections. In this chapter, we give you the foundation to use the basic selection tools. If, after you make a selection, you want to modify or transform that selection, check out Chapter 2 of this book. Finally, masking is yet another way to make a selection. Be sure to look at Book VI, Chapter 4, for the lowdown on masking.

Defining Selections

Defining a selection means that you specify which part of the image you want to work with. Everything within a selection is considered selected. Everything outside the selection is unselected. Seems simple enough. It is, except that ...