63MAkIng SELECTIOnS
manY COmPuteR applications let you manipulate ele-
ments on a page as objects. That is to say, you click or double-click
an object to select it, and then you modify the object in any of sev-
eral ways permitted by the program. For example, to make a word
bold in Microsoft Word, you double-click the word and then click
the Bold button. In Adobe Illustrator, you can make a shape bigger
or smaller by clicking it and then dragging with the scale tool. In
QuarkXPress, you move a text block to a different page by clicking
and dragging it.
The real world holds a similarly high re-
gard for objects. Consider the three sun-
flowers pictured in Figure 3-1. In life, those
flowers are objects. You can reach out and
touch them. You can even cut them and
put them in a vase.
Although Photoshop lets you modify snap-
shots of the world around you, it doesn’t
behave like that world. And it bears only a
passing resemblance to other applications.
You can’t select a sunflower by clicking
it—as you could had you drawn it in, say,
Illustrator—because Photoshop doesn’t
perceive the flower as an independent
object. Instead, the program sees pix-
els. And as the magnified view in Figure
3-1 shows, every pixel looks a lot like its
neighbor. In other words, where you and
I see three sunflowers, Photoshop sees a
blur of subtle transitions, without form
or substance.
Figure 3-1.
Where you
see flowers...Photoshop sees
only pixels