Photoshop Interface Tutorial: The Select Menu

Select, Deselect, Feather, Transform Selections, Load/Save Selections, and More

In this Photoshop tutorial, we'll look at Photoshop's Select Menu, as part of our look at Photoshop's user interface.

Photoshop's Select menu is where you find options related to making selections. The most commonly used options under the Select Menu are "Select All", "Deselect", "Inverse", "Feather", and "Transform Selection", as well as "Load Selection" and "Save Selection". Again, I've colorized the menu to make the various option groupings more obvious. In Photoshop, the groups are divided simply by the horizontal lines. Let's take a look at some of the most useful options in the Select Menu. Selecting and Deselecting The first group in the Select Menu is straightforward for the most part. "All" allows you to select everything on a layer, "Deselect" removes the selection. "Reselect" will reselect the last selection you made. The only not-so-straightforward option here is "Inverse", which will select everything that outside of your selection and deselect everything that was originally selected. In other words, if you drag out a rectangular selectin in the middle of a layer, Photoshop will select everything within that rectangular selection and leave everything outside of the rectangular shape deselected. By choosing "Inverse", Photoshop will do the exact opposite. It will select everything that was outside of the rectangular selection area and deselect everything that's inside of it. You may be wondering why you'd ever want to do something like that, but it actually comes in very handy more often than you'd think. For example, sometimes it's easier to select everything you don't want selected in an image (perhaps the object you want selected is framed by a solid colored background, in which case selecting the backgound would be easier than selecting the object) and then inverse the selection to select everything you did want to select..

Selecting and Deselecting Layers

The second group under the Select Menu may seem very similar to the first group, but they're actually quite different. The first group selects the <em>contents</em> of a layer, while the options in this second group select the layers themselves.

The first option, "All Layers", will as the name implies select every layer in your document. The second option, "Deselect Layers", will deselect any layers you had selected.

The third option though is very handy indeed. "Similar Layers" will automatically select every layer in your document that is of the same type as the layer you currently have selected. If you have a type (as in text) layer selected, "Similar Layers" will select every type layer in your document. Have a shape layer selected? It will select every shape layer in your document. And of course, if you have a layer containing pixels selected, it will select every layer containing pixels. This is extremely handy if, for example, you need to change the font used on every type layer in the document from, say, Arial to Helvetica. Simply select one type layer, then select "Similar Layers" from the Select Menu, switch to your Type tool, change the font up in the options bar to Helvetica, and presto! The font used on every type layer in the document is now Helvetica.

Color Range

The third group under the Select Menu contains just one option, "Color Range". Choosing this option opens up the Color Range dialog box allowing you to make a selection based on the colors in the image.

Feather and Modify

The Select Menu's fourth group contains options for altering our selections after we've made them (these options are grayed out until we make a selection).

The first option, "Feather", allows us to give our selections a soft, "feathered" edge rather than the hard, unnatural edge we normally get with selections. You can set the amount of feathering from 0.2 (virtually no feathering at all) to 250, which is most likely way too much. The amount of feathering you need will depend on the effect you're trying to achieve as well as the resolution of the image. Higher resolution images will require more feathering to achieve the same results than lower resolution images do.

The second option in this group, "Modify", allows you to modify your selection in one of four different ways. You can add a border to your selection, which essentially creates a second selection around your intial selection, leaving everything between the two selections selected. You can then fill the area with a color to create a border effect similar to what you would achieve when stroking a selection. There's also an option here to "Smooth" your selection, which will, depending on the amount of smoothing you enter into the dialog box, smooth out any hard angles in your selection. And finally, you can choose to either "Expand" or "Contract" your selection by the number of pixels you enter into the dialog box.

Grow and Similar

The fifth group under the Select Menu is where we find the "Grow" and "Similar" commands. These commands are similar to the "Expand" command in the group above, with one key difference. While "Expand" simply expands the selection by a specified number of pixels, "Grow" and "Similar" use the tolerance range you've specified in the Magic Wand options to select pixels that are similar in color and tonal value to the pixels in your selection.

"Grow" will include all adjacent pixels that fall within the Magic Wand's tolerance range, while "Similar" will select all pixels that fall within the tolerance range regardless of their location in the image.

You can choose the "Grow" and "Similar" commands over and over again as needed to increase your selection in increments.

Transform Selection

The next group in the Select Menu is "Transform Selection" and is one you'll most likely use a lot. It allows you to move, resize, and distort a selection after you've already made it (and here's the cool part) without affecting anything inside the selection. The selection itself is completely independent of anything that appears to be inside of the selection while you're resizing or reshaping it.

To accept the changes you've made to your selection and to make it an active selection again, simply press Enter (Win) or Return (Mac).

Load/Save Selection

The final options group under the Select Menu is where we can load and save selections, very useful if you've spent a lot of time working on a complex selection and don't want to lose it or will need to use it again later. Selections are saved as independent channels in the Channels palette and, once saved, are then saved with your document when you close out of it.