Save My Selection to Reuse Again?

If you make a complex selection, or one that’s kind of a pain in the butt to make, you might want to save it, so if you have to bring it back later, you don’t have to start from scratch. Once your selection is in place, go under the Select menu and choose Save Selection. This brings up a dialog where you can name your selection (seen above left), if you like. If you don’t want to name it, it will be named Alpha 1, by default (any others you save will be named Alpha 2, Alpha 3, and so on). Once you save it, you can go and do anything else you want in Photoshop knowing that you can always come back and reload this selection. To reload the selection, go under the Select menu and choose Load Selection. When the Load Selection dialog appears (seen above right), choose whichever saved selection you want to load (Alpha 1, Alpha 2, whatever) from the Channel pop-up menu, click OK, and your selection is right back in place. By the way, if you save your file as a PSD (Photoshop’s native file format), your saved selection will be saved right along with the file, so you can use it again at a later time. If you save your file as a JPEG, the selection won’t be saved with it.