Photoshop Elements 8 for Mac: The Missing Manual

Chapter 5. Making Selections

One of Elements’ most impressive talents is that it lets you select part of your image and make changes only to that area. Selecting something tells Elements, “Hey, this is what I want to work on—don’t touch the rest of my picture.” You can select your entire image or any part of it.

Using selections, you can fine-tune your images in sophisticated ways. You could change the color of just one rose in a whole 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 gives you a whole bunch of different Selection tools to work with. You can draw a rectangular or circular selection with the Marquee tools, for instance. Or paint a selection on your photo with the Selection brush, or just draw a line with the Quick Selection tool and let Elements figure out the exact boundaries of your selection. And when you’re looking to pluck a particular object (a beautiful flower, say) from a photo, the Magic Extractor works wonders.

For most jobs, there’s no right or wrong tool, but with experience, you may find you prefer working with certain tools more than others. Often you’ll use more than one tool to create a perfect selection. This chapter teaches you about all the different Selection tools and how to use each one. And Elements 8 ushers in a new tool—Transform Selection—that ...