Selecting Irregularly Sized Areas
It would be nice if you could always get away with making simple rectangular or elliptical selections, but is life really ever that neat? You aren't always going to want to select a block-shaped chunk of your image. If you want to change the color of one fish in your aquarium picture, selecting a rectangle or square isn't going to help you any more than selecting the entire photo.
Thankfully, Elements gives you other tools that make it easy for you to make very precise selectionsâno matter their size or shape. In this section, you'll learn how to use the rest of the Selection tools. But first you need to understand the basic controls that they (almost) all share.
Controlling the Selection Tools
If you're the kind of person who never makes a mistake and you also never change your mind, you can skip this section. If, on the other hand, you're human, you need to know about the mysterious little squares you see in the Options bar when the Selection tools are active (see Figure 5-3).
These selection squares don't look like much, but they tell the Selection tools how to do their job: whether to start a new selection with each click, to add to what you've already got, or to remove things from your selection. They're available for all the Selection tools except the Selection brush and the Magic Selection brush, which have their own sets of options. From left to right, here's what they do:
Get Photoshop Elements 4: The Missing Manual now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
