You may have heard of selections, but you may not know exactly what they do.
A selection is a way to isolate part of an image.
So, you can make adjustments to that part, or work on only that area.
Once you've made a selection only the selected area will be impacted by your edits.
Whether those involve making an image adjustment, applying a filter, painting or lots more.
In this video, we'll cover some basics about working with selections.
You can follow along with this image from the practice files for this tutorial.
Let's jump right in and make a selection.
We're not focusing on selection tools in this video.
So, let's just use the first selection tool in the Tools panel.
Which is the Rectangular Marquee tool.
This tool is used to make rectangular and square shaped selections.
Click on that tool and then move into the image and start at the upper left corner of this building and click and drag out a rectangular selection of part of the building and include the parking lot below too.
The animated lines you see represent the edge of the selection.
They're sometimes called 'marching ants'.
If you were to do something to the image now like make an adjustment it would appear only inside the area defined by the 'marching ants'.
Before we do that take a look at the Options bar for this selection tool.
There you'll find an icon for Adding to a selection and one for Subtracting from a selection.
You'll use these often and you'll find them in the Options bar for many of the selection tools.
Let's say we want to Add to our selection to include the entire building.
Click the Add to Selection option in the Options bar and then come into the image and click inside the top right corner of the existing selection and drag to encompass more of the building and the parking lot too.
If you don't get it all you can come in and Add to the little bit that you didn't get the first time.
Now, let's say that you go too far - like this.
How do you subtract from a selection?
For that, go up to the Options bar and click on the next icon the Subtract from selection icon here.
Then come into the image and click and drag around the area that you want to remove from the selection.
I'm also going to subtract a little from the selection down here to remove the parking lot.
So, now that we have the building selected let's make an adjustment and you'll see that your adjustment affects just the area inside the 'marching ants'.
Let's go up to the Image menu and choose Adjustments and we'll use a Brightness/Contrast... adjustment.
Which we covered in more detail in an earlier tutorial in this series.
In the Brightness/Contrast dialog box drag the Brightness slider way over to the left.
To darken the building.
And drag the Contrast slider to the right to increase contrast.
And click OK.
As you can see that change is affecting only the area inside the 'marching ants'.
Let's say you wanted to make a different Brightness/Contrast adjustment to affect everything, except the building.
In that case you wouldn't have to start again creating a new selection.
Instead - you can invert this selection to select everything, except the building.
To do that, go up to the Select Menu and choose Inverse.
With this selection active, let's go to the Image menu and choose Adjustments, Brightness/Contrast.
And this time, let's increase the Brightness.
And click OK.
Finally, when you're finished with a selection it's important to deselect.
So that the next thing you do to the image isn't limited by the selection.
To do that, go to the Select menu and choose Deselect.
Or, you could use the keyboard shortcut Command + D, or Ctrl + D on Windows.
It's one to remember because you'll use it often.
When you save this image go to File, Save As... and save it with a different name.
So, you don't save over the original.
So those are the basics of selections.
But there's lots more to learn about making and working with selections.
So, stay tuned for the rest of the videos in this tutorial.
