Unlock The Full Power Of Basic Selections In Photoshop page 2

Using "Add To Selection" To Select Eyes

One of the most common questions I get is, "How do I select both eyes at once? I select one with the Lasso tool, but then when I go to select the other one, I lose the selection around the first eye". Let's look at this common problem, and how the "Add To Selection" option can solve it for us. I'll use this photo here:

The original photo.

I'm going to quickly grab my Lasso tool from the Tools palette:

Selecting the Lasso tool from the Tools palette.

I could also press L on my keyboard to select it.

With the Lasso tool selected, I'm going to draw a selection around the left eye first:

Selecting the left eye with the Lasso tool.

Now with the left eye selected (our left, her right), normally what would happen is that if I tried to select the eye on the right, I'd lose my selection around her left eye. But with the "Add To Selection" option, that's not the case. I'm going to hold down my Shift key once again to quickly access that "Add To Selection" option, which gives me that small plus sign in the bottom right corner of my mouse cursor, and then with my Shift key down, I'm going to select her right eye. Again, I don't need to hold the Shift key down the entire time. Once I've started my selection, I can release it. I'll go ahead now and select her other eye:

Selecting the other eye using the "Add To Selection" option. It's that easy.

And there we go, both eyes are now selected thanks to the "Add To Selection" option.

In the first example where we used "Add To Selection" to select all of the shape, I overlapped the selections to create one main selection. In this example with the eyes, my selections appear to be completely separate from each other, yet Photoshop still treats them as the same selection. I could select her hair, her eyebrows, her lips, and her teeth all separately as well, and as long as I'm using the "Add To Selection" option each time, Photoshop will treat them all as one selection.

So that's our look at the "Add To Selection" option. Now let's look at the "Subtract From Selection" option.

The "Subtract From Selection" Option

Before we see how the "Subtract From Selection" option works, let's first see where to access it. For that, we go back up to the Options Bar for another look at those four little icons. The "Subtract From Selection" icon is the third one from the left:

The "Subtract From Selection" icon in the Options Bar.

Now that we know where it is, let's see how to use it.

Sometimes when you're trying to select a complex shape, it's easier to select the entire shape first and then subtract from your selection. Let's use our shape again from the beginning of this tutorial:

The first time I selected this shape, I selected the bottom half first and then used the "Add To Selection" option to grab the remaining square section in the top right. This time, to show you how the "Subtract From Selection" option works, I'm going to start by selecting the entire shape. I'm going to use the Rectangular Marquee Tool once again, and I'll just drag a quick selection around the whole thing:

Selecting the entire shape with the Rectangular Marquee Tool.

Looks good, except for one obvious problem. By dragging a selection around the entire shape, I've also selected that empty square section in the top left. Thanks to the "Subtract From Selection" option though, I can easily fix that.

Just as we saw with the "Add To Selection" option, the "Subtract From Selection" option has a handy keyboard shortcut so we don't have to keep selecting it from the Options Bar every time we need it. All you need to do is hold down the Alt(Win) / Option (Mac) key, which places a little "minus sign" in the bottom right corner of your mouse cursor:

Hold down the Alt key on Windows or the Option key on Mac to quickly access the "Subtract From Selection" option.

Using my Rectangular Marquee Tool and the "Subtract From Selection" option, I'm going to select that empty square section in the top left of the shape to remove it from my existing selection. Holding down my Alt/Option key, I'm going to start my selection from just outside the top left corner of my existing selection, and then I'm going to drag my mouse down and to the right until I've selected the entire empty area that I want to remove:

Selecting the area I want to remove from my existing selection.

As with the "Add To Selection" option, you don't need to hold down the Alt/Option key the entire time you're dragging the selection. All you need to do is hold it down just before you start dragging, and then as soon as you've clicked your mouse button down, you can let go of the Alt/Option key.

Now that I've selected the part of the original selection that I want to remove, all I need to do is release my mouse button, and presto:

The empty square section in the top left has been removed from the original selection.

That empty section in the top left has now been removed from the original selection, leaving only my shape selected, thanks to the "Subtract From Selection" option.

Let's round out our look at the full power of basic selections in Photoshop with the final option, "Intersect With Selection".

The "Intersect With Selection" Option

First, let's go back up to the Options Bar to see where we can find the "Intersect With Selection" option, and then we'll see how to use it. Again looking at our four little yet powerful icons, the "Intersect With Selection" icon is the one on the right:

The "Intersect With Selection" icon in the Options Bar.

Just as with the "Add To Selection" and "Subtract From Selection" options, this one also has a handy keyboard shortcut so you don't have to keep going up to the Options Bar to access it. The keyboard shortcut is Shift+Alt (Win) /Shift+Option (Mac). So just as a quick keyboard shortcut summary:

• Shift = Add To Selection
• Alt (Win) / Option (Mac) = Subtract From Selection
• Shift+Alt (Win) / Shift+Option (Mac) = Intersect With Selection

Now that we know where it is in the Options Bar and how to quickly access it with the keyboard shortcut, what does the "Intersect With Selection" option do? For the answer to that, let's take a look at this new shape here:

Here we have two red crescent shapes, one on the left and one on the right, with an empty white area in between them. Let's say we needed to select that empty white area. We could try to use the Lasso tool, but unless you're talented at drawing perfect circles, good luck. We could use the Magic Wand tool here, since the area we want to select is solid white, but what if it wasn't? What if it was a full color photo and we needed to create a selection in that shape? The Magic Wand tool would probably be useless to us in that case. So what to do?

Well, Photoshop has a basic selection tool that's built for selecting round objects, the Elliptical Marquee Tool, so let's try that.

First, I'll select it from the Tools palette:

Selecting the Elliptical Marquee Tool from the Tools palette.

Then, with my Elliptical Marquee Tool selected, I'm going to draw a circular selection around that first shape on the left. As I drag, I'm going to hold down my Shift key to constrain my selection to a perfect circle:

Selecting the crescent shape on the left with the Elliptical Marquee Tool. Hold "Shift" to constrain the selection to a perfect circle.

Now I have that left shape selected, but I also have the white area in the middle selected, and my goal is to select onlythat white area in the middle. Let's see, I could try the "Add To Selection" option while dragging out another selection around the shape on the right:

Dragging a selection around the shape on the right using the "Add To Selection" option.

Nope, that didn't work. All it did was put a selection around both shapes. Maybe I could try dragging a selection around the shape on the right using the "Subtract From Selection" option:

Dragging a selection around the shape on the right using the "Subtract From Selection" option.

Nope, that didn't work either. The "Subtract From Selection" option was able to give me a perfect selection around the shape on the left, but that's still not what I wanted. Time to try the final option, Intersect With Selection.

The way "Intersect With Selection" works is that it looks at the initial selection you made and the selection you're currently dragging out, and keeps only the area where both selections overlap, or "intersect". So if, for example, I was to drag a circular selection around the shape on the left, and then drag another circular selection around the shape on the right using the "Intersect With Selection" option, what I'd end up with is a selection around only that white empty space between them where the two selections would overlap. Which, come to think of it, is exactly what I want!

Let's try it out. With my shape on the left already selected, and using the Elliptical Marquee Tool, I'm going to use the keyboard shortcut Shift+Alt (Win) / Shift+Option (Mac) and drag out a second selection around the shape on the right, causing the area in between the shapes to overlap. If you look in the bottom right corner of the mouse cursor (circled in red below), you can see a small "x", indicating that I'm using the "Intersect With Selection" option:

Dragging a selection around the shape on the right using the "Intersect With Selection" option.

As with the previous two options we looked at, once you've begun dragging out your selection, there's no need to continue holding down the Shift and Alt/Option keys.

Using "Intersect With Selection", I now have the shape on the right also selected, and we can see that both selections overlap around the white space between them, which is the area I want to select. All I have to do now is release my mouse button, and Photoshop will select only that white area in the middle where my selections intersected:

The white area in between the two shapes is easily selected with the "Intersect With Selection" option.

And there we have it. Using that "Intersect With Selection" option, selecting the white area between the two shapes was easy.

We're now armed with the full power of basic selections in Photoshop. Not only can we make new selections, we can addto existing selections, subtract areas from existing selections, and intersect selections to easily grab the area where they overlap. We've arrived at our full potential. The world is within our grasp. The sky's the limit. The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades. The..... okay, I'll stop now.