What Is a Selection?
When you want to edit a portion of your image, you must first select the area with which you want to work. People who paint cars for a living make “selections” very much like the ones used in Photoshop. If you've ever seen a car being painted, you know that painters carefully place masking tape and paper over the areas they don't want to paint (such as the windows, tires, door handles, and so on). That way, they can freely spray-paint the entire car, knowing that the taped areas are protected from “overspray.” At its most basic level, a selection in Photoshop works much the same way. Actually, it works much better, because with one selection, you have a choice—you can paint the car and leave the masked areas untouched, or you can paint the masked areas and leave the car untouched.
When you select an area by using one of Photoshop's selection tools (Marquee, Lasso, Magic Wand, and so on), the border of the selection looks a lot like marching ants. Once you've made a selection, you can move, copy, paint, or apply numerous special effects to the selected area (Figures 2.1 and 2.2).
Figure 2.1. When no selection is present, you can edit the entire image. (©2005 Stockbyte, www.stockbyte.com)
Figure 2.2. When a selection is present, you can change only the selected area.
There are two types of selections in Photoshop: a normal selection and a feathered selection (Figures 2.3 and 2.4). A normal selection has a hard edge; that is, when you paint or apply a filter to an image, you can easily see where the effect stops and starts. On the other hand, feathered selections slowly fade out at their edges. This allows filters to seamlessly blend into an image without producing noticeable edges. An accurate selection makes all the difference when you're enhancing an image in Photoshop. To see just how important it can be, take a look at Figures 2.5 to 2.7.
Figure 2.3. Normal selections have hard edges. (©2005 Stockbyte, www.stockbyte.com)
Figure 2.4. Feathered selections have soft edges.
Figure 2.5. The original image. (©2005 PhotoSpin, www.photospin.com)
Figure 2.6. An unprofessional selection.
Figure 2.7. A professional selection.
