In General        [TOP]

Some of the same things apply to any of the three methods, below, which are used to select areas from the image.

1. Marquee: First, the terminology. The area being selected is shown on the screen with a 'marquee', like a marquee of cycling light bulbs - also sometimes described as, 'marching ants'. It's a broken line that seems to slowly 'walk' around the selection area. The selection, then, is referred to as - the marquee. The marquee can be temporarily hidden by Shift-Ctrl-M (or Selections, Hide Marquee). Or one could just release the marquee with a right click, if one wishes to see the pasted image without all the 'ants', and then just UNDO (Ctrl-Z) to restore the marquee for further operations. Either way.
    
2. Inverting: You can 'invert' the marquee, the selection, from the menu bar, as Selections, Invert. But Shift-Ctrl-i does the same, as is quicker. Handy to select the outline of a box, say, and then invert to select the box, rather than the area around. It's used quite a lot.
   1. Put a menu in front of a background that's a solid color,
   2. capture the screen (print screen key on your keyboard), say for use in a tutorial, as here,
   3. paste (Ctrl-V),
   4. and then select an area roughly surrounding the menu, the box,
   5. crop (Shift-R) to get the smaller rectangular area,
   6. wand select everything outside the menu,
   7. and then INVERT to select the menu, itself,
   8. and crop again.
   See the example of this. I use it quite often.

 
3. Feathering: This helps to blend the borders or edges of the selection with the existing image, or new one into which you might paste the new selection. There's a feather setting on the menu bar, under Selections, Modify, Feather. And that changes the feathering of the selection after you've made it. Then in the Tool Options window, you may set the feather value you want, before you make your selection. Most of the time you'll want a feathering value of zero (but if you need it, it's there). Whether you set the feather before selecting, of afterward, if you then copy (Ctrl-C) what's inside the marquee, and paste into a new image (Ctrl-E), feathering might help blend that into the new image, as if it had been there all along (lighting, and coloring, and other things aside). You might cut a bright circle from some pattern, and paste it into a photograph of some trees, just for example? The feathering can help smooth the transition at the edges. However, it can be a bit fuzzy.
    
4. Anti-alias: So, there's anti-aliasing, which gives a smooth edge, but which is cleaner and sharper than feathering. There's an option box in Tool Options for anti-aliasing. You check the box, then make your selection. And this anti-aliasing will really blend in a selection with jagged edges (200K (using 'lasso' tool, below)).
    
5. Reshaping: If you wish to modify the outline of the selection area, hold down the Shift-key, and make another selection with any of the three tools, below. If you want to remove portions of the outline, hold down the Ctrl-key, and use a selection tool to change it. [You just have to press the key before you press down and hold the mouse button. You don't have to continue pressing the Shift or Ctrl key after that.] For example, if you have rectangle that's too short on one side, so that you can't just use the mover/right-click to slide it sideways, you could hold the Shift-key and select another rectangle of the same height but taking in a little more of the right side than the previous. When you do, the marquee with expand to incorporate the new boundry.
    
6. Resizing: From the menu bar, Selections, Modify, Expand, or Contract. The expand simply enlarges the entire marquee, the entire selection area, by the number of dots/pixels you give. And it contracts in the same way. This can be useful for blending into the rest of the image, say expanding by 1, and then feathering by 1 or 2 - should blend nicely. Or the expand can help remove little bits that the wand, or select similar (just below), didn't completely pick up. Or maybe it will help smooth out a rough outline you selected by hand with the lasso, and so forth.
    
7. Auto Expand: Sort of a time saving way to add, to auto-select, parts of the image not yet selected, based on what already is inside the marquee. From the menu bar, Selections, Modify, Grow Selection, or Select Similar, then set the wand tolerance (in Tool Options menu). It's this tolerance that picks out more of the image or less. The grow looks for areas similar to what's selected, not broken by any different patches inbetween in the image. The similar looks over the entire image, and automatically finds areas similar to what's selected and adds to the selection. If you have two black rectangles over a grayish/black background, a high tolerance might expand the selection beyond one or the other rectangle, but not both, assuming they don't touch after the grow. But the similar select will pick up both and add them to the marquee, since it looks over the entire image.
    
8. Copying: The selection can be implied just by the open image, in fact. Or you might have to select all (from the menu bar Selections, Select All), beforehand. The feathering will affect whether there's a faded border on the image - and feathering can be set in the Tool Options before the selection, or from the menu bar afterwards. It can be important in copying and pasting.
    

   • Edit, Copy, Ctrl-C: used so often, copies the selection
   • Edit, Paste, Ctrl-V: selection copied to a new image, entirely
   • Edit, Clear, Delete: places background style inside selection
   • Edit, Cut, Ctrl-X: combination of Copy and Delete
   • Window, Duplicate, Shift-D: creates copy of entire image, regardles of what's selected
   • Image, Crop to Selection, Shift-R: crops image to selection
   • Edit, Copy Merged, Shift-Ctrl-C: 'flattens' all layers in the image and makes a copy
    
9. Floating: There are two ways to 'pick up' a selection in an image. If you move the selection around, you either a) leave the background color where it had been, or b) PSP basically makes a temporary copy and pastes that selection onto the image, so nothing 'underneath' is changed. The latter is called - floating - the selection. And the former isn't so bad if you make sure that the background on that portion of the image is the same as the fill color; if it's not, the image starts to get holes. You can 'float' the selection by holding the - ALT key - before you move the selection around. Or, alternatively, you can press - Ctrl-F.
    
10. Moving: You can move the selection area, the marquee, itself, without affecting anything 'underneath'. Click on the Image Move button, and then right click the mouse button and hold that as you move the selection area, the marquee, over the underlying image.
     
11. Saving: The marquee, the selection area, can be saved to and loaded from either a) the alpha channel, or a file on disk, as a mask. White areas are the selection, black are not. More than one mask can be saved to the alpha channel, which is associated with each image; i.e. image A might have two selections saved to alpha, B might have three, and so on.

Select        [GENERAL]   [TOP]

The fixed form, or closed geometric shape, selection actually has 15 options - from the standard rectangle, to ellipse, to arrow shapes. In olden days, it was called the 'rubber band' select. You start at one place, press down the mouse button, move to create the selection, and release the button. Simple.

Lasso        [GENERAL]   [TOP]

The lasso is the freeform, or 'freehand', select which just follows the path you trace when holding down the mouse button. All noted, above, anti-alias (200K) gives the sharp, blended edge. Alt-key floats a freehand selection. And so on.
 
There are three freehand options:

as described, just tracing out the path as you hold down the mouse button and move the mouse around. Letting up on the button automatically connects the start and end point - and that's your selection.

just click and a line is automatically drawn from point to point. Double click and the start and end points are automatically connect - and that's your selection.

an edge finder, limited to a long, narrow rectangle that you can tilt in any direction. Click and PSP tries to automatically find, or trace along, a clear edge in the picture, within that narrow rectangle. It might work for higher contrast pictures, and not work so well for fuzzier photos, for example. The wand, just below, might be preferred, instead.

Wand        [GENERAL]   [TOP]

The wand is the auto-edge detect tool, used quite often. The Tool Options for the wand show five different options for 'looking over' the image, along with a Tolerance and Feather value. The tolerance is used to adjust the wand. Higher tolerance, and more area is selected. The idea is to generally find the edge of something within an image. PSP sees just a bunch of colors - and no edges, and we do. So you adjust the tolerance, and click the wand again, to see if it finds the edge you're looking at. It's not always so clean. And sometimes multiple passes are needed, at different tolerances. And sometimes it makes a difference depending on where on the image you click (sometimes, the difference in colors are too slight to see with the eye, but it makes a difference in generating the selection).