Making basic selections in Photoshop

- [Instructor] In this movie we're going to use the basic selection tools, to select a couple of items from this image and turn them into new files. This file is oldbackground.tif and if you have access to it then you can work along with me. If not, any file of your own will do of course. You might notice my interface has changed slightly, that's because I've gone into one of Photoshop's other view modes here, to make it easier for people on smaller screens to get the most out of the image.

Although, everything you've seen in the orientation is still here so don't worry about that. So the first thing we need to do is to zoom in on the two logos in the bottom right hand corner, because it's those that we'll be picking up. And I wish I could say this was a fictitious scenario, that you've got a flat image that you need to pull logos out of, but if I had a pound for every time I've actually done this in real life I could at least buy my self a nice new jacket, I would have thought, by now.

So to zoom in if you tap the "z" key on your keyboard that will get you the zoom tool which is at the bottom of the toolbox just over here. And if I can just stop myself from scrolling, so take the zoom tool over to the middle of the two logos, just here, I'm between the two. Then mouse down and drag just a short way, and then stop, because you'll find out you'll zoom in very, very quickly. If you've gone too far just hold down the "alt" or "option" key and click a couple of times until you've got a zoom level like I have here.

We're now going to pan to make this more comfortable to see, and you do that by holding down the spacebar, that gives you temporary access to the hand tool from the tool box, and then just drag the image to wherever is comfortable for you on your screen and release the spacebar. So the first tool we're going to use is the rectangular marquee tool, it is usually the default tool in Photoshop and if you tap "m" on your keyboard, that should access it.

Just have a look at the toolbox here and the second icon down, if it looks like this rectangle then you're set, if not long press and this will give you access to that entire family of tools. But seeing as we've already got the rectangular marquee tool now let's move over to the black logo down at the bottom here. Try and position your cursor on the top left corner of the black rectangle, mouse down, and in one motion drag across to the diagonally opposite corner, and release like so.

I'm just going to hold down the spacebar here and pan up slightly so it's more easy for you to see what I've got. So now that I have that selection what I'm going to do is copy that. So, "command c", "control c" to copy, and then we're going to create a new image based on this file. If you do "command n", "control n", then the new document dialogue will open and you will most likely see clipboard here as a preset or a recent file.

I know it isn't recent but you'll see one anyway. Double click on that to create a brand new file and then paste in that logo, "command v", "control v" if you want to paste it in. And this introduces a new layer and we're going to leave it that way, so it has its layers and it will save nicely as a Photoshop document with those. So just as we did in the previous movie, go to the file menu and chose save, and then into the folder that you've created for your exercise just call this one "Massife Rectangle Logo" like so.

Once you've done that if you get the maximized compatibility dialogue hit "okay", that means it's more compatible with several other Adobe applications that understand the format, and then close it by using the shortcut "command w", "control w", or going to the file menu and choosing close. Back in the main file here, let's change the view so we can see this roundel. Now ellipses are always slightly more tricky to select so what I do is, I make a larger ellipse than I need and then I transform the selection down.

Let's go over to the toolbox and long press on the marquee selection tool here, the rectangular marquee tool and chose the elliptical marque tool. Then just come up to a region about here, I'm on the left hand side, I'm a little way above, and then mouse down and drag across like so. You get a much bigger shape than you actually need. Now, you can reposition this if you take your cursor inside that area there, you can actually move the selection around, and it's up to you if you actually want to do that or not, but what I'm going to do next is transform it.

So if we go to the select menu in the top level menu system, you'll see that transform selection is about three quarters of the way down, and when you chose it you get this box around. All we need to do now is to drag these handles in the middle of each side down to the maximum edge of the ellipse, and as you do so the selection will be transformed. Now don't worry if it doesn't look the right shape at the moment, or meet the edges, it will do as soon as you get the last one into place.

Once you've done that simply double click or hit the tick in the control strip or options bar to commit the selection. And then again, we'll copy this, "command c", "control c", create a new document. It'll say clipboard again only with the dimensions that you've got here, and then paste and once more save this as a Photoshop file. So file, save, go into your folder that you've set aside for this and do this as "Massife Roundel", as a PSD and you're done, move on to the next exercise.

So, all we need to do now is just close up this file, which we can do from the file menu or use the shortcut "command w", or "control w" on PC. The selection doesn't add anything to the files' data so you can just close without saving.