Elliptical Marquee Tool

The second choice under the Marquee pop-up menu is the Elliptical Marquee tool. This tool works in the same way as the rectangular version, except it creates an ellipse (Figure 2.13). And it's a little bit trickier to define its size because you have to work from the “corner” of the ellipse, which doesn't really exist. (What were they thinking when they came up with this idea?) Actually, you might find it easier to choose View > Show Rulers and then drag out a few guides (you can get them by dragging from the rulers) and let the “corners” snap to them. Either that, or hold the spacebar to reposition the selection before you release the mouse button, just as I mentioned with the Rectangular Marquee tool.

To discard the areas that appear outside a rectangular selection border, choose Image > Crop.

Now let's look at the choices in the Marquee options bar (Figure 2.14). When you click on any of the Marquee tools, their options will automatically be available in the options bar at the top of your screen. The following list describes the options you'll find in this palette:

Figure 2.14. The Marquee options bar.

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• Feather: Allows you to fade out the edge between selected and unselected areas. I usually leave this option turned off, because I might forget that a Feather setting had been typed in previously. This one little setting might mess up an otherwise great selection. Instead, I find it much easier to make a selection and then press Option-Command-D on the Mac or Alt-Ctrl-D in Windows (or just choose Select > Feather).

• Anti-aliased: Determines whether a one-pixel-wide border on the edge of a selection will blend with the image surrounding it. This provides nice, smooth transitions, and helps prevent areas from looking jagged. I recommend that you leave this check box on at all times, unless, of course, you have a great need for jaggies (sometimes they're preferred for multimedia applications).

• Style menu: Controls the shape and size of the next selection made. When the Style pop-up menu is set to Normal, your selections are not restricted in size or shape (other than their having to be rectangles or ellipses). After changing this menu to Fixed Aspect Ratio, you'll be confronted with Width and Height settings (Figure 2.15). By changing the numbers in these areas, you can constrain the shape of the next selection to the ratio between the Width and Height settings. For example, if you change Width to 2 and leave Height at 1, your selections will always be twice as wide as they are tall. This can be useful when you need to find out how much of an image needs to be cropped when printing it as an 8 by 10, for example.

  Figure 2.15. The Fixed Aspect Ratio option.

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I use the Fixed Size option (Figure 2.16) much more often than the Fixed Aspect Ratio option. Fixed Size lets you type in an exact width and height; that way, anytime you click using either the Rectangular or Elliptical Marquee tool, you'll get a selection exactly that size. What's more, if you didn't get it in exactly the right spot, you can just drag the selection around the screen before releasing the mouse button. For instance, Macintosh OS 9 desktop icons are always 32 pixels wide and 32 pixels tall, so I use these numbers when selecting something I want to use as an icon. When entering a Width or Height setting, you can specify a measurement system by adding a few letters after the number you enter; otherwise Photoshop will default to the measurement system used for the rulers.

Figure 2.16. The Fixed Size option.

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To specify a width and height for cropping your image, add the following letters to select the measurement system: px = pixels in = inches cm = centimeters pt = points pica = picas