>>>ALAN: So now we get to move on to a new set of tools. We've talked about the move tool -
that's the very top tool in our tool bar. We're now going to move on to the
selection tools in Photoshop. Namely, the lasso tools, the marquee tools, and the
quick selection and magic wand tools. Now these selection tools are absolutely
fundamental in Photoshop. In fact, selections are absolutely
fundamental in Photoshop. You can tell a Photoshop newbie by how bad their
selections are. And we've all seen bad Photoshop jobs where they kind of cut
something out and maybe put it on a different background, and they're not
fooling anybody. You can see bad, white lines - looks almost like they ripped
something out of a newspaper. Those are bad selections. If you're making bad
selections, you're not using Photoshop well. The bulk of this class is gonna be
practicing and getting better at making good selections. In fact, your midterm is
just an advanced, composite image where you have to make all sorts of isolations
and selections. And the goal is to fool me into thinking that you didn't
actually cut them out - it was all meant to be there. In this first tutorial,
though, we're gonna break down the marquee tool. And the marquee tool is pretty simple.
It draws a fence, so to speak, a selection fence around any part
of your image. Now the downside to marquees is, that they work only in basic
shapes - squares and rectangles and then circles and kind of ovals - and that's it.
So we're limited with our marquee tools, but the option bar begins to open up new
possibilities for this tool. So let's jump in and I'll show you guys how to
use the marquee tool.
Now I've gone ahead and made a blank, web large, artboard to start.
Why don't you guys go ahead and go to "File," "New," and make a new web large artboard.
Now to learn about our marquee tool, we need to have something inside of
our artboard that we can begin to interact with. So let's choose a color in
our color picker window - I'm gonna choose a nice blue -
And let's use our paint bucket tool - which, again, lives right underneath the gradient tool -
to fill our Layer 1 with color. So now we have something we can start to work with.
So let's come up to our marquee tool. Let's click and hold our marquee
tool, and let's talk about what we're seeing here. We have a rectangular
marquee tool, an elliptical marquee tool, and then single row and single column
marquee tools that we're not going to talk about in this class.
Let's start with our rectangular marquee tool. And a marquee tool is great for making selection fences.
To use it, we simply click and hold our mouse, and drag the mouse out, and release.
Go ahead and make a rectangle on yours.
When you release the mouse, you see this dancing, dotted line pattern going around the edges.
Photoshop calls this the dancing ants. I call it the dancing, dotted line - either
way, whenever you see this inside of Photoshop, it means there's a selection made.
So we'll be seeing this all throughout the next few exercises.
So once we've made a selection, it really just comes down to what do we want to do with that selection.
And there's a lot of things that we could do with it.
Let me walk you through a few of them. First, we could simply hit delete on the keyboard.
If we hit delete on the keyboard, we've now cut a hole out of our blue, allowing
us to see through it now to transparency. So we can always just hit delete and erase
whatever is inside of our selection. Go ahead and hit CTRL-Z and bring
back what you just cut out. Aside from deleting what's in a selection, we can
relocate, or move, what's inside of a selection. Let's come back up to our move
tool that we've learned earlier. Notice when you hover over the area inside of
your selection, we see a black arrow with a scissors icon next to it.
If I click and drag this now, I have removed - I've lifted and cut out - the
area that was inside of that selection, leaving once again, a hole in its place.
I'm gonna go ahead and let go and hit CTRL-Z to put that back. The other
thing we can do is fill the selection with color. So let's get out our Paint
Bucket tool again and let's choose a new color for our background color. I'm gonna
choose a nice yellow. Toggle your background color to be your foreground
color, and then simply click inside of the selection to fill it with color.
So we can make selections as kind of like trace lines and then fill that with color.
So we can erase, we can move or cut out, or we can fill a selection with color.
And go head and hit CTRL-Z for me. Now if we've made a selection, we should learn how to
invert a selection. Invert a selection. Let's come up to select in the menu bar.
Since we're working with selections, our first menu bar item that we're going to
learn is going to be 'select.' We have three options up here that are worth
looking at. We can 'select all' - that's everything inside of the artboard, we can
'deselect' - which simply removes our selection altogether, or we can invert
our selection. Go ahead and click on 'inverse.' Notice, now, how that's put a
dancing dotted line around the edges of our artboard, as well as on the inside.
That means, now, that if I were to click my yellow Paint Bucket, it's going to fill
all the areas except what was inside. It's the inverse of what we had selected.
Inverting our selection has become really important here in the next few
exercises, so get comfortable with inverting your selection. I'm going to go
ahead and hit CTRL-Z to bring it back. Now let's deselect. Let's go up to 'select'
in the menu bar and then hit 'de-select.' And that removes our selection lines altogether.
So let's get out our marquee tool again and let's draw a rectangle
somewhere on our screen. Now let's look at our option bar - remember the option
bar is the area where we can start to adjust and manipulate this shape to be
what we need it to be. And the marquee tools aren't necessarily known for being
terribly exciting - they're pretty utilitarian. They make
square and circle selections if we need them. But let's look at these icons up
here at the top. I think yours defaults to this first one. I call these the
'post-it note icons,' because they look kind of like post-it notes. And we'll see
the post-it note icons for almost every selection tool that we begin to explore.
Let's look at this first one - it says 'new selection,' which means every time I click
and drag it's gonna make a brand new selection. Nothing terribly surprising there.
Let's explore the second one. It says 'add to selection.' So if I click on
that and I draw a new box, notice how it kind of eats away (I call it 'pac-manning') and
it kind of 'pac-man's' away the selection line that was there, and it kind of added
to it. And I can keep going, and going, and going. Kind of making my own floor plan here.
Now we have a much more complex selection than the marquee tool
originally allowed for, and that's just exploring one option in the option bar.
Let's go to the next post-it note icon. So the stacked squares again, but this time
it's a white square behind a black square. This says 'subtract from selection.'
So this does the opposite of the 'add to selection.' When I draw my new rectangles,
it eats away at that particular portion of the selection.
Now this fourth one here honestly is really strange and I've yet to find
anybody that actually uses it. It's called 'intersect with selection.' Check it out.
If I have my current selection here and I draw a new box, which area do you
think it's gonna keep? Yeah, the area there in the middle. So it's kind of a
weird way of thinking of selections - it's there if you need it, I never use it, but
that's what 'intersect selection' does. So we have our post-it note icons for our
marquee tool. The regular 'selection,' 'add,' 'subtract,' and 'intersect' - we're gonna be
using those all throughout the next exercises. Go ahead and deselect for me.
Select, deselect. Now if we get out our elliptical marquee tool, notice how the
option bar looks exactly the same. The post-it note icons do the exact same
thing. This time, however, we're working with ovals rather than rectangles.
I'm gonna go ahead and deselect. Now if you ever want to make a perfect square or a
perfect circle inside of Photoshop, you have to hold 'shift' on your keyboard as
you drag. So as I start to drag here, notice I can make a oblong or strange
looking oval, but if I hold 'shift' now, it locks my circle to be a perfect circle.
Same thing with a rectangle. If I click and drag and hold shift, it makes a
perfect square. So as we move forward in our different selection tools, we'll very
quickly realize that there are better options out there to make good selections.
Especially if we have complex shapes other than a square or a circle.
But, I can't tell you how many times I return to the marquee tool for just
those really simple, geometric selections. So practice this again if you need to,
and I'll see you guys in the next tutorial
where we're gonna start talking about the lasso tool.