Adobe Photoshop CS5 for Photographers - Martin Evening [17]
Figure 1.41 The first time you use the Macintosh keyboard shortcut, this pops a dialog asking you to select the desired default behavior: do you want this shortcut to hide the Photoshop application, or hide all extras?
The Photoshop selection tools are mainly used to define a specific area of the image that you wish to modify, or have copied. The use of the selection tools in Photoshop is therefore just like highlighting text in a word processor program in preparation to do something with the selected content. In the case of Photoshop, you might want to make a selection to define a specific area of the image, so that when you apply an image adjustment or a fill, only the selected area is modified. Alternatively, you might use a selection to define an area you wish to copy and paste, or define an area of an image that you want to copy across to another image document as a new layer.
New Paste Into commands
The standard Paste command pastes the copied pixels as a new layer centered in the image. The Paste Special submenu offers three options. The Paste In Place command ( ) pastes the pixels that have been copied from a layer to create a new layer with the pixels in the exact same location. If the pixels have been copied from a separate document, it pastes the pixels into the same relative location as they occupied in the source image. Paste Into pastes the clipboard contents inside a selection, while Paste Outside pastes the clipboard contents outside a selection.
The marquee selection tool options include the rectangular, elliptical and single row/ single column selection tools. In Figure 1.42 I have shown the elliptical marquee tool in use and below that, in Figure 1.43, an example of how you can use the key to add to a rectangular marquee selection. The lasso tool can be used to draw freehand selection outlines and has two other modes: the polygon lasso tool, which can draw both straight line and freehand selections, plus the magnetic lasso tool, which is like an automatic freehand lasso tool that is able to auto-detect the edge you are trying to trace.
Figure 1.42 A selection can be used to define a specific area of an image that you wish to work on. In this example, I made an elliptical marquee selection of the inner tire wheel and followed this with an image adjustment to desaturate the red color.
Figure 1.43 In this example I used the rectangular marquee tool to marquee one of the inner panels and followed this by holding down the key to select more panels with the rectangular marquee. I deleted the selected areas and placed the cut-out image as a layer above a seascape image (see Figure 1.66 for an example of how Photoshop layers work).
The quick selection tool is a bit like the magic wand tool as it can be used to make selections based on pixel color values; however the quick selection tool is a little more sophisticated than the standard magic wand and hence it has been made the default tool in this particular tool group. As you read through the book you'll see a couple of examples where the quick selection tool can be used to make accurate selections based on color, and how these can then be modified more precisely using the Refine Edge command. For full descriptions of these and other tools mentioned here don't forget to check out the Photoshop CS5 for Photographers Help Guide that is on the DVD.
Color Range
In the Photoshop Select menu you will see an item called ‘Color Range’, which is a color-based selection tool (Figure 1.44). While the quick selection and magic wand tools create selections based on luminosity, Color Range can be used to create selections that are based on similar color values. Some important new functionality was added to Color Range in Photoshop CS4 turning this into a very powerful selection making tool.
Figure 1.44 This shows the Color Range dialog with expanded menus that show the full range of options for the Color Range selection dialog.
Color Range tip
A Color Range selection tool can only be