How to Use the Marquee Tool in Photoshop
You can use the Photoshop marquee tool to select areas of an image that you can then copy, cut, or crop. It can also isolate sections of a graphic to apply a filter or effect to a particular area. Marquee selections also mark out boundaries for stroke and fill commands to create shapes and lines. These instructions apply to Photoshop CS5 and later, although some settings and commands may differ between versions.
Additional Options for the Marquee Tool
When you select the marquee tool, a new set of options appears in the toolbar at the top of the screen. For the elliptical and rectangular marquees, hold Shift to make perfect circles and squares. For the single row and single column marquees, click and drag the marquee to select the one-pixel line of your choice. The first group determines what happens every time you click:
New selection: You’ll start a completely new shape.Add to selection: If you make one selection and click again, the two areas will join together if they overlap. You can also use this option by holding Shift before you make the next selection.Subtract from selection: The second shape you create will remove itself from the first (i.e., placing a circle inside another circle will create a selection the shape of a doughnut). You can also subtract one selection from another by holding the Alt or Option key before you start making the second shape.Intersect from selection: Making multiple shapes will give you a selection based on where they overlap.
Feather lets you create a softer border for your selection area. Enter a value from 0 to 250 to set how far out you want to blur the selection beyond the line you select. The Anti-alias box tells Photoshop whether to “smooth” the borders of a selection. This setting is useful when you’re working with low-resolution images. The Style pulldown menu lets you decide how the shapes behave when you use the elliptical or rectangular tools.
Normal means that the ellipse or rectangle will follow your mouse pointer exactly.Fixed ratio lets you decide the relative dimensions of the width and height of your selection. For example, enter 2 and 1 to always make ellipses and rectangles twice as wide as they are tall.Fixed dimension means that every time you click, you’ll create a specific size of a shape. Enter the height and width in pixels to set these values.
Putting the Selections to Use
Once you have selected an area, you can apply different uses to it. Use a Photoshop filter, and it will only apply to the selection. Cut, copy, and paste to use it elsewhere or alter your image. You can also use many of the functions within the Edit menu, such as fill, stroke, or transform, to alter the spot you’ve selected. Create a new layer, and then fill a selection to build shapes. Once you learn the marquee tools, you’ll be able to manipulate not just the whole, but parts, of your images.
