Understanding Adobe Photoshop CS5: The Essential Techniques for Imaging Professionals

5. Selection Tools and Techniques

If you really want to get things done in Photoshop, you have to be good at making selections. You might want to extract a subject from a photo or maybe change the sky to another shade of blue. Or, maybe the sweater in your advertisement needs to be orange instead of red, or you’d like to duplicate some of the background crowd so your photo doesn’t look so empty. In each case, you’ll need an accurate selection.

Why? You may be able to look at a digital image and clearly recognize that it’s a brown bear sitting on a rock ledge with some logs in the background. Unfortunately, your computer just sees a bunch of pixels. A little human intervention is necessary to distinguish which part of the image you want to manipulate ...