Unlock The Full Power Of Basic Selections In Photoshop

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Summary: If all you've been doing with Photoshop's basic selection tools is making a new selection every time, you've been missing out. In this tutorial, learn how to unlock their full potential by adding to, subtracting from, and intersecting selections!

Written by Steve Patterson
Exclusively for Photoshop Essentials.com.

Part of our complete collection of Photoshop Basicstutorials.

In this Photoshop tutorial, we're going to look at how to get the most out of Photoshop's basic selection tools, such as the Marquee tools or the Lasso tool. If all you've been using them for is to make a new selection every time, you've been missing out on their full potential. We're going to see how you can add to an existing selection, how to subtract an area from an existing selection, and even how to intersect two selections and grab the area that overlaps. Once you become familiar with the full power of basic selections, they'll seem a whole lot more useful to you.

Let's start by taking a look at how to add to an existing selection.

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Adding To A Selection

To keep things simple, I have a fairly basic shape open in my Document Window:

A basic shape in Photoshop.

I want to select this shape using the most common selection tool in all of Photoshop, the Rectangular Marquee Tool, so I'm going to grab it from my Tools palette:

Selecting the Rectangular Marquee Tool from Photoshop's Tools palette.

I could also press M on my keyboard to quickly access it.

Now, let's say all I know how to do is make a new selection with this tool. Hmm, this is going to be a bit tricky. I'll start by dragging a selection around the bottom half of the shape. That should be easy enough:

Dragging a selection around the bottom half of the shape.

There we go, looks good. The bottom half is selected. There's still that square part in the top right though, so I'll just draw out another selection, this time around that top square. Since I'm selecting a square, I'm going to start from the top left corner of the shape and then hold down my Shift key as I drag to constrain my selection to a perfect square:

Selecting the square section in the top right of the shape.

There we go, the top of the shape is now selected. Except... wait a minute. What happened to my original selection around the bottom part of the shape? It's gone!

Yep, it's gone. I lost my original selection the moment I began dragging out my second selection, and that's the default behavior of selections in Photoshop. Once you start dragging out another selection, your existing one disappears, which means there's no way I can select this shape. It's beyond the power of Photoshop to select something this complex. Oh well, thanks for joining us.

Okay, seriously, there most certainly is a way to select this shape, although we could never do it by dragging out a new selection each time, as we've already seen. What we need to be able to do is add a selection to our initial selection, and if this is something new to you, you're about to wonder how you ever managed to work in Photoshop without knowing how to do this.

The Four Main Selection Options In The Options Bar

Before we go any further, with my Rectangular Marquee Tool selected, let's take a look up in the Options Bar, specifically at four little icons on the left side of the Options Bar:

The four main selection option icons in the Options Bar.

They may look small, but each of those four little icons is very powerful, because each one represents a different option for working with our selections. The first one on the left, the one I'm clicking on in the screenshot above, is the New Selection icon, and it's the one that's selected by default when working in Photoshop. All it does is create a new selection each time. If you never knew these four options were there, this is the option you've always been using without even knowing it.

The second icon directly beside it is the one we're going to look at here, the Add To Selection icon:

The "Add To Selection" option in the Options Bar.

With this option selected, any selection I draw will be added to any selection(s) I've already made. Let's see how this can help us select our shape.

First, I'm going to click back on the "New Selection" icon since I'm going to drag out my initial selection around the bottom half of the shape, the same as I did before:

Dragging a selection around the bottom half of the shape once again.

Now that I have my initial selection, I'm going to select that "Add To Selection" option so that I can add another selection to this one. Rather than selecting the option from the Options Bar though, I'm going to use the quick keyboard shortcut, which is to simply hold down the Shift key just before I start dragging out my selection. As soon as you press the Shift key, you'll see a small "plus sign" icon in the bottom right corner of your cursor, which indicates that you're about to add to the existing selection:

Hold down the "Shift" key to quickly access the "Add To Selection" option. A small plus sign appears in the bottom right corner of the cursor icon.

Let's try selecting that top square part again. With my Shift key held down, I'm going to drag out another selection around that square section in the top right of the shape. This time, rather than trying to select just the square, I'm going to select some of the area below the square as well so that this second selection overlaps my intial one:

Dragging out the second selection, making both selections overlap.

One quick note... You don't need to continue holding down the Shift key the whole time you're dragging out additional selections. All you need to do is hold down Shift, then click your mouse to start dragging out the selection, and once you've started dragging, you can safely release the Shift key.

Now that I've dragged out my second selection that I'm adding to my intial selection, I'm going to release my mouse button, and look what happens:

The second selection has now been added to the first.

Thanks to the "Add To Selection" option, which I accessed simply by holding down my Shift key, my second selection has been added to my initial selection, and my once impossible to select shape has now been completely selected.

Let's look at a common real world example to see how beneficial the "Add To Selection" option really is.