Selections and channels

Selections There are many ways you can create a selection in Photoshop. You can use any of the main selection tools such as the lasso tool or the Select ➯ Color Range command, or convert a channel or path to a selection. Whenever you create a selection, you will notice that it is defined by a border of marching ants (Figure 8.1). It is important to remember that selections are only temporary-if you make a selection and accidentally click outside the selected area with the selection tool, the selection will be lost, although you can always restore a selection by using the Edit ➯ Undo command (Cz [Mac], Lz [PC]). As you work on a photo in Photoshop, you will typically use selections to define specific areas of an image where you wish to edit the image or maybe copy the pixels to a new layer and when you are done, you’ll deselect the selection. If you end up spending any length of time preparing a selection, you’ll maybe want to save such selections by storing them as alpha channels (also referred to as ‘mask channels’). To do this, go to the Select menu and choose Save Selection… The Save Selection dialog box then asks if you want to save the selection as a new channel (Figure 8.2). If you select a pre-existing channel from the Channel menu you will have the option to replace, add,

Figure 8.1 A selection is represented in Photoshop using marching ants.