Select Square or Rectangular Areas of My Image?

If you want to edit just a particular part of your image (rather than editing the entire image), make a selection of the area where you want to work, and then any changes you make will only affect that selected area. There are lots of different selection tools in Photoshop for helping you make precise selections and one of the most popular is the Rectangular Selection tool (it’s actually called the Rectangular Marquee tool because it adds a selection that looks like a Hollywood marquee with flashing lines running around it). To use it, choose it from the Toolbox (as seen above; or just press M) and click-and-drag it out over the area you want to select. By default, it draws a rectangle, but if you want a perfect square instead, press-and-hold the Shift key and it constrains the selection to a perfect square. To reposition your selection once you’ve drawn it, just click the same tool anywhere inside that flashing marquee area and drag it to a new location. To move what’s inside that rectangle (or square), picking up a chunk of your image and moving it, switch to the Move tool (V; the first tool at the top of the Toolbox), click inside that flashing marquee area, and drag it. To remove your selection (called “deselecting”), press Command-D (PC: Ctrl-D).