Now that you know all about making selections, it’s time to learn some of the finer points of using and manipulating them. Elements gives you several handy options for changing the areas you’ve selected and for moving images around once they’re selected. You can even save a tough selection so you don’t have to do that again.
One thing you often want to do with a selection is invert it. That means telling Elements, “You know the area I’ve selected? I want you to select everything except that area.”
Why would you want to do that? Because sometimes it’s easier to select what you don’t want. For example, suppose you have an object with a complicated outline, like the building in Figure 5-18. If you want to use just the building in a scrapbook of your trip to Europe; it’s going to be difficult to select. But the sky is just one big block of color, so it’s easy to select the sky with the Magic Wand.
Figure 5-18. Top: Say you want to make some adjustments to this building. You could spend half an hour meticulously selecting all that Gothic detail, or just select the sky with a couple of clicks of the Magic Wand and then invert your selection to get the building. Here, the marching ants around the sky show that it’s the active selection—but that’s not what you want. Bottom: Inverting the selection (Select→Inverse) puts the ants around the building instead, without you going to the trouble of tracing over all the elaborate, lacy details of the roofline.
What if you want to tweak the size of your selection? For example, say you want to move the outline of your selection outward a few pixels to expand it. Elements gives you a really handy way to do that: the Transform Selection command.
With Transform Selection, you can easily drag any selection larger or smaller, rotate it, squish it narrower or shorter, or pull it out longer or wider (imagine smooshing a circular selection into an oval, for instance). As its name implies, Transform Selection does all these things to the selection, not to the object you’ve selected. (If you want to distort an object, you can use the Move tool [The Move tool] or the Transform commands [Transforming Images] instead.) This is really handy, as you can see in Figure 5-19.
Figure 5-19. Left: Sometimes it’s tough to draw exactly the selection you want. Here, attempting to avoid the sign and the palm fronds led to cutting off part of the rope bumper on the boat’s bow. Right: After you’ve decided that it would be easier to clone out any small unwanted details (page 315 explains how to clone), Transform Selection makes it easy to resize the selection to include the whole rope.
To use Transform Selection:
Make a selection.
Use the selection tool(s) of your choice. Transform Selection is especially handy when you’ve used one of the Marquee tools and didn’t hit the selection quite right, but you can use it on any selection.
Go to Select→Transform Selection.
A bounding box with little square handles appears around your image, as shown in Figure 5-19. The Options bar changes to show the settings for this feature, which are the same as those for the Transform tools (Transforming Images). Most of the time you won’t need to worry about these settings.
Grab a handle and adjust the area covered by your selection.
The different ways you can adjust a selection are explained in the list below.
When you get everything just right, click the green checkmark or press Enter/Return to accept your changes.
If you mess up or change your mind about the whole thing, click Cancel (the red No symbol) to revert to your original selection.
You can change your selection in most of the same ways you learned about back in the section on cropping:
To make your selection wider or narrower, drag one of the side handles.
To make your selection taller or shorter, drag a top or bottom handle.
To make your selection larger or smaller, drag a corner handle. Before you start, take a quick look at the Options bar to be sure the Constrain Proportions checkbox is turned on if you want the selection’s shape to stay exactly the same. If you want the shape to change, then turn the checkbox off.
To rotate your selection, move your mouse near a corner handle till you see the curved arrows, and then click and drag to spin the selection’s outline to the angle you want.
Transform Selection is a great feature, but it only expands or contracts your selection in the same ways the Transform tools can change things. In other words, you can change the selection’s width and its height as well as its proportions, but you can’t change a star-shaped selection into a dog-shaped one, for example. Elements gives you a number of other ways to adjust the size of a selection, which may work better for you in certain situations, although in most cases Transform Selection is probably the easiest.
But what do you do if you just want to enlarge the selection to include surrounding areas of the same color? Elements has you covered. Figuring out which of the following commands to use can be confusing because the two ways to enlarge a selection sound really similar: Grow and Expand. You might think they do the same thing, but there’s a slight but important difference between them:
Grow (Select→Grow) moves your selection outward to include more similar, contiguous colors, no matter what shape your original selection was. This command doesn’t care about shape; it just finds more matching contiguous pixels.
Expand (Select→Modify→Expand) preserves the shape of your selection and just enlarges it by the number of pixels you specify.
Similar (Select→Similar) does the same thing as Grow but looks at all pixels, not just adjacent ones.
Contract (Select→Modify→Contract) shrinks a selection by the number of pixels you specify.
So what’s the big distinction between Grow and Expand? Figure 5-20 shows how differently they behave.
Figure 5-20. Top: In the original selection, the butterfly’s wing is selected, but Elements missed some small areas on the edge. (The area outside the selection was deleted to make it easier to see what’s selected.) Bottom left: If you use Grow to enlarge the selection, you also get parts of the background that are similar in tone. As a result, your selection isn’t wing-shaped anymore. Bottom right: If you use Expand instead, the selection still is still shaped like the wing, only now the edges of the selection move outward to include the dark border area you missed the first time. Here the selection is moved out more than you’d want; it took in some of the background, while still preserving the shape of the original selection.
So far you’ve learned how to move selections themselves (the marching ants), but often you make selections because you want to move objects around—like putting that dreamboat who wouldn’t give you the time of day next to you in your class photo. You can move a selected object in several ways. Here’s the simplest, tool-free way to move something from one image to another:
Select it.
Make sure you’ve selected everything you want—it’s really annoying when you paste a selection from one image to another and then find you missed a spot.
Press Ctrl+C/⌘-C to copy it.
You can use Ctrl+X/⌘-X if you want to cut it out of your original; just remember that Elements leaves a hole if you do that.
Decide where to put the selected object.
If you want to dump the object into its very own document, choose File→New→“Image from Clipboard.” Doing so creates a new document with just your selection in it.
If you want to place the object into an existing photo, then use Ctrl+V/⌘-V to paste it into another image in Elements.
Once the object is where you want it, you can use the Move tool (explained next) to position it, rotate it, or scale it to fit the rest of the photo. You can even paste it into a document in another program. Just be sure you’ve turned on Export Clipboard in Edit→Preferences→General/Adobe Photoshop Elements Editor→Preferences→General.
Tip
If you copy and paste a selection and then notice it’s got partially transparent areas in it, back up and go over your selection with the Selection brush using a hard brush. Then copy and paste again.
You can also move things around within your photo using the Move tool, which lets you cut or copy selected areas. Figure 5-21 shows how to use the Move tool to conceal distracting details.
Figure 5-21. Left: A little home improvement with Elements. Say you want to get rid of the meter access hatch in this photo to keep it from drawing the eye away from your lovely flowerboxes. To do that, select a piece of the sidewalk, and then activate the Move tool and hold down the Alt/Option key while dragging to copy the selected area. (If you use the Move tool without holding down the Alt/Option key, Elements cuts out the selection instead, leaving a hole in your photo.) Right: After using the Clone Stamp (page 315) to blend in the new piece, you’d never know that slab of sidewalk wasn’t solid.
The Move tool lives at the very top of the Full Edit Tools panel. To use it:
Make a selection.
Make sure your selection doesn’t have anything in it that you don’t want to copy.
Switch to the Move tool.
Click the Move tool’s icon or press V. Your selection stays active but is now surrounded by a rectangle with square handles on it.
Move the selection and then press Enter when you’re satisfied with its position.
As long as your selection is active, you can work on your photo in other ways and then come back and reactivate the Move tool. (If you’re worried about losing a complex selection, save it as described in the next section.) If you’re not happy with what you’ve done, just press Ctrl+Z/⌘-Z as many times as needed to back up and start over again.
You can move a selection in several different ways:
Move it. If you simply move a selection by dragging it, you leave a hole in the background where the selection was because the Move tool truly moves your selection. So unless you have something under it that you want to show through, that’s probably not what you want to do.
Copy it and then move the copy. If you press the Alt/Option key as you drag with the Move tool, you’ll copy your selection so the original stays where it is. But now you have a duplicate to move around and play with, as shown in Figure 5-21.
Resize it. You can drag the Move tool’s handles to resize or distort your selected material, which is great when you need to change the size of your selection. The Move tool lets you do the same things as Free Transform (see Free Transform).
Rotate it. The Move tool lets you rotate your selection the same way you can rotate a picture using Free Rotate (see Free Rotate Layer): Just grab a corner and turn it.
Tip
You can save a trip to the Tools panel and move selections without activating the Move tool. To move a selection without copying it, just place your cursor in the selection, hold down Ctrl/, and then move the selection. To move a copy of a selection so you don’t damage the original, do the same thing, but hold down the Alt/Option key as well. To move multiple copies, just let go, press Ctrl+Alt/⌘-Alt again, and drag once more.
The Move tool is also a great way to manage and move objects that you’ve put on their own layers (Chapter 6). Aligning and Distributing Layers explains how to use the Move tool to arrange layered objects.
You can tell Elements to remember the outline of your selection so that you can reuse it again later on. This is a wonderful, easy timesaver for particularly intricate selections. It’s also very handy if the new Text on Selection tool (Adding Text to a Selection) misbehaves, forcing you to restart Elements to get it working again; you can save your selection before you quit Elements and then reload it to pick up where you left off.
Note
Elements’ saved selections are the equivalent of Photoshop’s alpha channels. Keep that in mind if you decide to try tutorials written for the full-featured Photoshop. Incidentally, alpha channels saved in Photoshop show up in Elements as saved selections, and vice versa. You can save a selection, load it again, and save the file with the selection active to have it appear as an alpha channel in a program like Microsoft Word or Apple’s Pages.
To save a selection:
Select something.
Choose Select→Save Selection, name your selection, and then click OK.
When you want to use that selection again, go to Select→Load Selection, and there it is waiting for you.
Tip
When you save a feathered selection and then change your mind about how much feather you want, use the Refine Edge command to adjust it. You can also save a hard-edged selection, load it, and then go to Select→Feather to add a feather if you need one. That way you can change the amount each time you use the selection, as long as you remember not to save the change to the selection.
It’s probably just as easy to start your selection over if you need to tweak a saved selection, but you can make changes if you want. This can save you time if your original selection was really tricky to create.
Say you’ve got a full-length photo of somebody, and you’ve created and saved a selection of the person’s face (called, naturally enough, Face). Now, imagine that after applying a filter to that selection, you decide it would look silly to change only the face and not the person’s hands, too. So you want to add the hands to your saved selection.
You have a couple of ways to do this. The simplest is just to load up Face, activate your selection tool of choice, put the tool in “Add to Selection” mode, select the hands, and then save the selection again with the same name.
But what if you’ve already selected the hands and you want to add that new selected area to the existing, saved Face selection? Here’s what you’d do:
Go to Select→Save Selection.
In the Save Selection dialog box, choose your saved Face selection from the Selection drop-down menu. All the radio buttons in the dialog box become active.
In the Operation section of the dialog box, turn on the “Add to Selection” radio button and then click OK.
Elements adds what you just selected (the hands) to the saved Face selection and saves it all, so now your Face selection includes the hands, too.
Tip
If you find yourself frequently making changes to saved selections, you might want to check out layer masks (Layer Masks) to see if they’d suit your purpose better. They’re much quicker to modify than selections, if they’ll work for you.