USING SELECTION TOOLS
1 Marquee Tools
The Rectangular and Elliptical Marquee Tools can be activated by pressing the M key. They are ideal for selecting parts of your image that are rectangular, square, circular or elliptical in shape. Hold Shift while making your selection to keep the aspect ratio the same for a perfect square or circular selection. If you need to rene your selection further, you can go to Selection > Transform Selection. This will put a bounding box around the selection that you can manipulate into shape.
2 Lasso Tools
The group of lasso tools can be activated by pressing the keyboard shortcut ‘L’ and includes the Lasso Tool for selecting quick freehand areas, the Polygonal Lasso Tool, which allows you to click along multiple points of an object to select it (double-clicking will also nish your selection early) and the Magnetic Lasso Tool. The latter allows you to click once and then move your mouse around the image to create your selection with Photoshop automatically detecting the edges of an object for you.
3 Quick Selection Tools
Two tools that make selections quickly and easily are the Magic Wand and Quick Selection Tools, both accessed with the keyboard shortcut ‘W’. These are both a great starting point for selecting large areas such as skies – although, here, you could also use the command Select > Sky. They’re a good starting point but selections made with these tools often require cleaning up with some of the aforementioned tools, or by using the Select and Mask function from the Options bar to perfect them.