From the course: Photoshop One-on-One: Fundamentals

Selection and Move tool basics - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop One-on-One: Fundamentals

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Selection and Move tool basics

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- [Instructor] All right, we're going to start things off by reviewing a few selection tool basics with the help of these guys right here, the geometric selection tools which are the rectangular and elliptical marquee. The rectangular marquee tool selects series in the shape of rectangles and squares. The elliptical marquee select series in the shapes of ovals and circles. And they're both incredibly useful. Those are the kinds of tools you'll use on a regular basis. These next two tools that don't have shortcuts, notice that, and they'll come back to the shortcuts in a moment, they aren't nearly as useful but I'll tell you how they work, just in case. The single row marquee tool selects a row of pixels across the entire image, but it's just one pixel tall. The single column marquee tool selects an entire column up and down the image, but it's only one column wide. So me personally, I haven't used these tools really ever but they are there in case you need them. Now, speaking of the keyboard shortcuts, imagine for a second that some other tool is selected such as the freeform lasso tool, then I can get to the rectangular marquee tool by pressing the M key. If I want to switch from the rectangular marquee to the elliptical marquee, I press Shift + M. So Shift + M will switch me to the elliptical marquee tool as we're seeing right here. And then if I press Shift + M again, I'll switch back to the rectangular marquee. All right, so let's say I drag with the rectangular marquee tool, I'm going to create a rectangular selection outline surrounded by these animated dashes which are commonly known as the marching ants. And so notice if I drag outside that marching ants boundary then I'll create a new selection outline like so. If I drag inside then I'll move the selection outline to a different location. So I'm not moving any selected pixels, I'm moving the selection outline all by itself. If I want to move the pixels, then I need to switch to the move tool, up here at the top of the toolbox which you can get by pressing the V key. And then notice when I moved my cursor inside the selection outline then it appears as an arrowhead with a pair of scissors. And that tells you that if you were to drag the selection like so that you are actually cutting it away from the background. So notice we're working with the JPEG image which means we have no layer, and so we just have a flat background as we're seeing here and we've left a hole that's colored with the background color, which is by default white. If you see some other color that's because the background color down here at the bottom of the toolbox is set to some other color. All right now, at this point we have what's known as a floating selection, meaning that I can drag it to a different location like so. However, it's a little bit dangerous because if I were to switch back to the rectangular marquee tool and draw a new selection outline then I would de-select the floating selection and it would drop into place. And so notice we still have a flat background, which means that I've damaged the image, in its current condition. Now, if I don't want a damaged image then I could just press Control + Z or Command + Z on the Mac, as many times as it takes to put that selection back in place. And so the safer way to work if you want to move a selection is to jump it to its own independent layer, which you can do, as you may recall, by taking advantage of the keyboard shortcut of Control + J or Command + J on the Mac in which case Photoshop goes ahead and jumps the selection to a new layer, as we're seeing right here. It duplicates the contents of that selection. So notice if I turn it off the moon is still in pristine shape in the background. And so if I turn it back on and then I switched to the move tool, or I can get to the move tool on the fly by pressing and holding the Control key, here on the PC or the Command key on the Mac at which point I see an arrowhead, which is telling me that I can move the selected layer like so. And then when I release the Control key or the Command key on the Mac, I returned to the selected tool, which is the rectangular marquee. All right, just so that we know all of our jumping options here I'll go ahead and switch back to the background. If I select a region and I press Control + Alt + J or Command + Option + J on the Mac, not only will I duplicate the selection to a new layer just as I did before but I'll be invited to name the layer as well. I'm just going to go ahead and escape out of that. So I can show you two other keyboard shortcuts. One is Control + Shift + J or Command + shift + J on the Mac, and what that's going to do is jump the selection to a new layer once again, however, it's going to leave a hole in the background. So instead of duplicating the selection it's cutting the selection. All right, I'm going to undo that just by pressing Control + Z or Command + Z a couple of times, so I can show you one more shortcut, which is mass your fists J that is all the modifier keys Control + Shift + Alt + J here on a PC or Command + Shift + Option + J on the Mac. And because you have the Alt or Option key down you're going to force the display of the new layer dialogue box. I'm going to call this cut because thanks to the fact I had the shift key down as well, I cut a hole in the background as we're seeing right here. And so now if I Control drag or Command drag that layer to a new location, you can see that I've performed a cut instead of a copy. And those are a few selection basics that work with any selection tool, by the way, here inside Photoshop.

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