| Adobe Photoshop Basics | |
Now let's take a look at some of the commands found on the Select menu. (Continued below...)
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We've already covered some of the shortcut keys for the most often used commands:
Select All = Ctrl/Command-A
Deselect = Ctrl/Command-D
Reselect = Shift-Ctrl/Command-D
Inverse = Shift-Ctrl/Command-I
Next is the Color Range command. This is another way of making selections based on color similarity, but unlike the magic wand tool, you have a bit more control and can refine your selection visually. To learn more about this command, see the online help file or page 142 of the Photoshop 5.0 User Guide or page 144 of the Photoshop 6.0 User Guide.
The feather command allows you to soften or blur the edges of your selection by a specific number of pixels. You can experiment with it on one of your own images to create a soft vignette effect. Here's how:
- Make an oval selection
- Feather by 10-20 pixels
- Invert the selection
- Fill with a background color.
The feather command is usually fine when you just need to feather the selection by a few pixels, but in most cases, you need a more visual approach. I'll be showing you a better alternative to the feather command when we discuss Quick Mask Mode very soon.
Next up is the Modify submenu which includes the commands Border, Smooth, Expand, and Contract.
Border creates a selection that frames the border of previously selected area. The border can be any size from 1 to 64 pixels. See the example below where the circular selection was converted to a border selection of 10 pixels.
 Original Selection |
 Converted to 10 pixel border selection |
 You'll rarely ever use this command, and if you fill the border selection with a color you'll see why. It makes a fuzzy selection. |
If you wanted to outline a selection with a hard edge, you'd be better off using the Stroke command. If we step back in the history palette to before we used the border command, we can choose Edit > Stroke.
Set the width and the location of the stroke, and you get a nice hard-edged border like the one to the right.
The Smooth command smoothes out any sharp angles in your selection. In the example below, the first outline resulted from a freehand selection with the lasso tool that was stroked. The second outline is the same selection after apply the smooth command with a radius of 10. For the third outline, smooth was applied again with a radius of 10.
Try this out on your own. Remember, you can stroke a selection and then move the selection over by clicking inside it and dragging.
Expand and Contract are pretty self explanatory. Expand makes the selection larger by a specific number of pixels; and contract makes the selection smaller by a specific number of pixels.
Original Selection |
Expand Selection 10 pixels |
Contract Selection 10 pixels |
The Grow command expands a selection to includeadjacent areas that are similar in color to the current selection. The Similar command expands a selection to include non-adjacent areas that are similar in color. In the example here, I first made a rough lasso selection of the inside of the leaf.
Using grow, the selection expands to the entire leaf as shown below.
Using similar, the selection expands to include most of both leaves.
This is similar to the contiguous option for the Magic Wand tool. Grow is equivalent to having contiguous checked, and similar is the equivalent of have contiguous unchecked. Feel free to save this image to experiment with on your own.
Take some time to experiment with all these commands on your own before moving on to learn about transforming selections. If desired, post your practice files to the discussion forum.
Next > Transforming Selections
