If you’re the kind of person who never makes a mistake and you also never change your mind, you can skip this section. If, on the other hand, you’re human, you need to know about the mysterious little squares you see in the Options bar when the selection tools are active (Figure 5-3).

Figure 5-3. These cryptic squares can save you hours of time once you understand how to use them to tell the selection tools how to behave.

These selection squares don’t look like much, but they tell the selection tools how to do their job: whether to start a new selection with each click, to add to what you’ve already got, or to remove things from your selection. They’re available for all the selection tools except the Selection brush and the Quick Selection tool, which have their own sets of options. From left to right, here’s what they do:

Figure 5-4. “Intersect with Selection” lets you take two separate selections and select only the area where they intersect. If you have an existing selection, when you select again your new selection includes only the overlapping area. Here, the top blue rectangle is the first selection, and the bottom purple square is the second. The light area shows the final selection after you let go of the mouse button.

This is another tremendously helpful Elements feature. It allows you to create smooth, feathered, plausible edges on any selection—a must when you want to realistically blend edited sections into the rest of an image. It appears in the Options bar for some of the tools that allow you to make irregular selections (like Quick Selection), or you can use it on any active selection by going to Select → Refine Edge. To use it, first make a selection, and then:

You get three sliders in Refine Edge; you may need to use only one, or any combination of them to improve your selection. Your choices are:

It’s easy to refine too much, so go in small increments and keep checking your selection. Adobe makes it easy to monitor things by giving you a choice of views.

The buttons above the Description area of the dialog box give you two different ways to see your selection:

You also get icons for the Zoom (The Hand Tool) and Hand (Changing the Size of Your Image) tools, so you can adjust the view to see more or different details.

The Quick Selection tool doesn’t work every time for every selection, but it’s a wonderful tool that’s worth grabbing first for any irregular selection. You can use the Selection brush or one of the other selection tools to clean up afterward, if needed.

The Selection brush is one of the greatest tools in Elements. Making complex selections and cleaning up selections are really, really easy with the Selection brush. You can use it on its own or as a complement to the Quick Selection tool, described in the previous section. The Quick Selection tool is awesome, but sometimes it just can’t stop your selection exactly where you want. The Selection brush gives you total control because it only selects the area you cover with your brush stroke.

With the Selection brush, you simply paint over what you want to select by dragging over that area. You can let go, and each time you drag again, Elements automatically adds to your selection. There’s no need to change modes in the Options bar or hold down the Shift key the way you do with the other selection tools.

Not only that, but the Selection brush also has a Mask mode, in which Elements highlights what isn’t part of your selection. Mask mode is great for finding tiny spots you may have missed and for checking the accuracy of your selection outline. In Mask mode, anything you paint over gets masked out; in other words, it’s protected from being selected.

Masking is a little confusing at first, but you’ll soon see what a useful tool it is. Figure 5-6 shows the same selection made with and without Mask mode.

The Selection brush is pretty simple to use:

The Selection brush gives you several choices in the Options bar:

Figure 5-7. These two Selection brushstrokes show the way the Hardness setting affects the edges of your selection. Here, two different selections were made in the sky. The top selection was made at 100-percent hardness, and the bottom one is at 50 percent. (The selected area was then deleted to show you the outline more clearly.)

Switching between Selection and Mask mode is a good way to see how well you’ve done when you finish making your selection. In Mask mode, the parts of your image that are not part of your selection have a red film over them, so that you can clearly see the selected area.

You can temporarily make the Selection brush do the opposite of what it’s been doing by holding down Alt while you drag. This can save a lot of time in a tricky selection, since you don’t have to keep jumping up to the Options bar to change what’s happening, and you can keep the view (either your selection or the mask) the same. For example, if you’re in Selection mode and you’ve selected too large an area, Alt+drag over the excess to remove it. If you’re masking out an area, Alt+drag to add an area to the selection. This may sound confusing, but some things are easier to learn just by doing them.

The Magic Wand is a slightly temperamental—and occasionally highly effective—tool for selecting an irregularly shaped, but similarly colored, area of an image. If you have a big area of a particular color, the Magic Wand can find its edges in one click. It’s not actually all that magical: All it does is search for pixels with similar color values. But if it works for you, you may decide it should keep the “magic” in its name because it’s a great timesaver when it cooperates, as Figure 5-8 shows.

Figure 5-8. Just one click with the Magic Wand created this selection. If there isn’t a big difference between the color of the area you want to select and the colors of neighboring areas, the Wand isn’t as effective as it is here.

Using the Magic Wand is pretty straightforward. You just click anywhere in the area you want to select. Depending on your tolerance setting (explained in the following bullet list), you may nail the selection at once, or it may take several clicks to get everything. If you need to click more than once, remember to hold down Shift so that each click adds to your selection.

The Magic Wand does its best job when you offer it a good solid block of color that’s clearly defined and doesn’t have a lot of different shades in it. But it’s frustrating when you try to select colors that have any shading or tonal gradations. You have to click and click and click. Elements gives you two special Options bar settings that you can adjust to help the Wand do a better job:

Figure 5-9. In the left photo, the Contiguous checkbox has been turned on. By turning it off, as in the photo at right, you can select all the orange hats with just one click. If you want to quickly clean up the selection afterward, use the Selection brush (covered on The Selection Brush).

You also get access to the new Refine Edge command for fixing up the edges of your selection, as explained on Refine Edge.

The big disadvantage to the Magic Wand is that it tends to leave you with unselected contrasting areas around the edge of your selection that are a bit of a pain to clean up. You may want to try out the Quick Selection tool (Selecting with a Brush) before trying the Magic Wand, especially if you want to select a range of colors. If you put a Magic Wand selection on its own layer (see Chapter 6 to understand how layers work), you can use Refine Edge (Refine Edge) or the Defringe command (Removing Objects from an Image’s Background) to help clean up the edges.

The Magic Wand is pretty good, but it works well only when your image has clearly defined areas of color. A lot of the time, you’ll want to select something from a cluttered background that the Magic Wand just can’t cope with. Sometimes you may think the easiest way would be if you could just draw around the object you want to select.

Enter the Lasso tool. There are actually three Lasso tools: the Lasso tool, the Polygonal Lasso tool, and the Magnetic Lasso tool. Each tool lets you select an object by tracing around it.

Figure 5-10. Old-fashioned vignettes like this one are a classic example of where you’d want a fairly large feather. In this figure, the feather is 15 pixels wide. The higher the feather value, the softer the edge effect is.

You activate the Lasso tools by clicking their icon in the Toolbox (it’s just below the Marquee tool) or by pressing L, and then selecting the particular variation you want in the Toolbox pop-out menu. You then drag around the outline of your object to make your selection. The following sections cover each Lasso tool. All the Lasso tools let you apply feathering and anti-aliasing as you make your selection (see the box on The Lasso Tools), and the basic Lasso and the Polygonal Lasso give you access to Refine Edge (Refine Edge) right in their Options bar settings.

The basic Lasso tool

The theory behind the basic Lasso tool is very simple. Click the tool, and your cursor changes to the lasso shape shown in Figure 5-11. Just click in your photo, and then drag around the outline of what you want to select. When the end of your selection gets back around to join up with the beginning, you’ve got a selection.

In practice, it’s not always so easy to make an accurate selection with the Lasso, especially if you’re using a mouse. A graphics tablet is a big advantage when using this tool, since tablets let you draw with a pen-shaped pointer. (There’s more about graphics tablets on Graphics Tablets.) But even if you don’t happen to have a graphics tablet lying around, you can make all the tools work just fine with your mouse once you get used to their quirks.

It helps to zoom the view way in and go very slowly when using the Lasso. (See Zooming and Repositioning Your View for more information on changing your view.) Many people use the regular Lasso tool to quickly select an area that roughly surrounds their object, and then go back with the other selection tools, like the Selection brush or the Magnetic Lasso, to clean things up.

Figure 5-11. The end of the rope, and not the lasso loop, is the selection-drawing point of the basic Lasso tool. If the cursor’s shape bothers you, change it to crosshairs by pressing the Caps Lock key anytime as you select.

Tip

If you want to save time when you need to draw a straight line for part of your border, hold down Alt and click the points where you want your straight line to start and end. So if you’re selecting an arched Palladian window, for instance, once you get around the curve at the top of the window and reach the straight side, press Alt and click at the bottom of the side to get the straight part of the side all in one go.

Once you’ve created a selection, you can use the new Refine Edge command from the Options bar to adjust and feather the edges (see The Lasso Tools). Press Escape or Ctrl+D to get rid of your selection if you decide you don’t want it anymore.

The Magnetic Lasso

The Magnetic Lasso is a very handy tool, especially if you were the kind of kid who never could color inside the lines or cut paper chains out neatly. The Magnetic Lasso snaps to the outline of any clearly defined object you’re trying to select, so you don’t have to follow the edge exactly.

As you might guess, the Magnetic Lasso does its best work on objects with clearly defined edges. You won’t get much out of it if your subject is a furry animal, for instance. The Magnetic Lasso also likes a good strong contrast between the object and the background. (You can change the cursor shape with the Caps Lock key, just as with the basic Lasso.)

Click to start a selection. Then move your cursor around the perimeter of what you want to select; click again back where you began to finish your selection. You can also Ctrl+click at any point, and the Magnetic Lasso will immediately close up whatever area you’ve surrounded. You can also adjust how many points the Magnetic Lasso puts down and how sensitive it is to the edge you’re tracing, as shown in Figure 5-12.

In addition to Feathering and Anti-aliasing (explained in the box on The Lasso Tools), the Magnetic Lasso comes with four additional settings in the Options bar:

• Width tells the Magnetic Lasso how far away to look when it’s trying to find the edge. The value is always in pixels, and you can set it as high as 256.

• Edge Contrast controls how sharp a difference the Magnetic Lasso should look for between the outline and the background. A higher number looks for sharper contrasts, and a lower number looks for softer ones.

• Frequency controls how fast Elements puts down the fastening points you see in Figure 5-12.

• Use Tablet Pressure to Change Pen Width—the little button with a pen at the right of the Options bar—only works if you have a graphics tablet. When you turn this setting on, how hard you press controls how Elements searches for the edge of objects you’re trying to select. When you bear down harder, it’s more precise. When you press more lightly, you can be a bit sloppier and Elements will still find the edge.

Figure 5-12. One nice thing about the Magnetic Lasso is that it’s easy to back up as you’re creating your selection. As you go, it lays down the tiny boxes, called anchor or fastening points, shown in this figure. If you make a mistake with the Magnetic Lasso, pressing Backspace takes you back one point each time you press the key. (If you want to completely get rid of a Magnetic Lasso selection you’ve begun but not completed, just press Escape.) If the Magnetic Lasso skips a spot or won’t grab onto a spot where you want it to, you can force it to put down an anchor point by clicking once where you want the anchor to appear.

Many people live full and satisfying lives paying no attention whatsoever to these settings, so don’t feel like you have to fuss with them all the time. You can usually ignore them unless the Magnetic Lasso misbehaves.

Tip

You get better results with the Magnetic Lasso if you go more slowly than if you speed around the object. Like most people, the Magnetic Lasso does better work if you give it time to be sure where it’s going.

The Polygonal Lasso

At first, this may seem like a totally stupid tool. It works something like the Magnetic Lasso in that it puts down anchor points, but it creates only perfectly straight segments. So you may think, “Well that’s great if I want to select a Stop sign, but otherwise, what’s the point?”

Actually, if you’re one of those people who just plain can’t draw, and you even have a hard time following the edge of an object that’s already on the screen, this is the tool for you. The trick is to use very short distances between clicks. Figure 5-13 shows the Polygonal Lasso in action.

The big advantage of using the Polygonal Lasso over the Magnetic Lasso is that it’s much easier to keep it from getting into a snarl. Your only options for this tool are Feathering and Anti-aliasing (which are explained in the box on The Lasso Tools) and Refine Edge (Refine Edge).

Figure 5-13. If you have limited dexterity, the Polygonal Lasso tool and a lot of clicks eventually get you a nice accurate selection. You need to zoom way, way in to use this tool to select an object that doesn’t have totally straight sides. Here, the Polygonal Lasso easily made it around the curve of the handle by clicking to make extremely short segments.

One thing you often want to do with a selection is invert it. That means telling Elements, “Hey, you know the area I’ve selected? Well, I want you to select everything except that area.”

Why would you want to do that? Well, sometimes it’s easier to select what you don’t want. For example, suppose you have an object with a complicated outline, like the building shown in Figure 5-18. Say you want to use just the building in a scrapbook of your trip to Europe. It’s going to be difficult to select. But the sky is just one big block of color. It’s a lot faster to select the sky with the Magic Wand than to try to get an accurate selection of the building itself.

Figure 5-18. Left: Say you want to make some adjustments to just the building in this photo. You could spend half an hour meticulously selecting all that Gothic detail, or instead just select the sky with a couple of clicks of the Magic Wand and invert your selection to get the building. Here, the sky has the marching ants around it to show that it’s the active selection—but that’s not what you want. Right: Inverting the selection (Select → Inverse) gives you the ants around the buildings without the trouble of tracing over all the elaborate lacy details of the roofline.

To invert a selection:

What if you want to tweak the size of your selection? Sometimes you may want to move the outline of a selection outward a few pixels to expand it. Figuring out how to do so confuses people because Elements offers two similar-sounding ways to do it: Grow and Expand. They sound like they should do the same thing, but there’s a slight but important difference between them.

So what’s the big difference between Expand and Grow? Look at Figure 5-19 to see how differently they behave.

Figure 5-19. Top: In the original selection, everything in the Stop sign has been selected except the small white border on the outside of the sign. Bottom left: If you use Grow to enlarge the selection, you also get parts of the building that are similar in tone. As a result, your selection isn’t shaped like a Stop sign anymore. Bottom right: But if you use Expand instead, the selection still has the exact shape of the sign, only now the edges of the selection move outward to include the sign’s white border area.

Often you make selections because you want to move objects around—like putting that dreamboat who wouldn’t give you the time of day next to you in your senior year class photo. You can move a selection in several ways.

Here’s the simplest, tool-free way to move something from one image to another:

The Move tool

You can also move things around within your photo by using the Move tool, which lets you cut or copy selected areas. Figure 5-20 shows how to use the Move tool to conceal distracting details in photos.

Figure 5-20. Top: Here’s the original version of the photo used for the feathered vignette on The Lasso Tools. Let’s say you wanted to get rid of the window in the upper-right corner of the top photo. By copying and moving a piece of the wall, you can cover up the window and create a simpler background to put the focus on the woman rather than the building. You select the area prior to moving it. Bottom: Hold down the Alt key while using the Move tool to copy a selected area. The piece of wall slides into its new position as a window hider. (If you use the Move tool without holding down the Alt key, Elements cuts away the selection, leaving a hole in your photo.)

The Move tool lives at the very top of the Full Edit Toolbox. To use it:

1. Make a selection.

   Make sure your selection doesn’t have anything in it that you don’t want to copy.

2. Switch to the Move tool.

   Click the Move tool or press V. Your selection stays active but is now surrounded by a rectangle with box-shaped handles on the corners.

3. Move the selection and press Enter when you’re satisfied with its position.

   As long as your selection is active, you can work on your photo in other ways and then come back and reactivate the Move tool. If you’re worried about losing a complex selection, save it as described in the next section. If you’re not happy with what you’ve done, just press Ctrl+Z (as many times as needed) to back up, and you can start over again.

You can move a selection in several different ways:

• Move it. If you just move a selection by dragging it, you leave a hole in the background where the selection was. The Move tool truly moves your selection. So unless you have something under it that you want to show through, that’s probably not what you want to do.

• Copy it and move the copy. If you press the Alt key as you’re moving, you’ll copy your selection, so your original remains where it was. But now you’ll have a duplicate to move around and play with.

• Resize it. You can drag the Move tool’s handles to resize or distort your copy, which is great when you need to change the size of your selection. The Move tool lets you do the same things you can do with Free Transform (see Transforming Images).

• Rotate it. The Move tool lets you rotate your selection the same way you can rotate a picture using Free Rotate (see Free Rotate Layer). Just grab a corner and turn it.

Tip

You can save a trip to the Toolbox and move selections without activating the Move tool. To move a selection without copying it, just place your cursor in the selection, hold down Ctrl, and move the selection. To move a copy of a selection, follow the same procedure but hold down the Alt key as well. You can drag the copy without damaging the original. To move multiple copies, just let go, then press Ctrl+Alt again and drag once more.

The Move tool is also a great way to manage and move objects that you’ve put on their own layers (Chapter 6). Aligning and Distributing Layers explains how to use the Move tool to arrange layered objects.

You can tell Elements to remember the outline of your selection so that you can reuse it again later on. This is a wonderful timesaver for particularly intricate selections and easy to do, too.

To save a selection: