Absolute Beginner's Guide to Digital Photography

This chapter walks you through the most important

selection tools:

■ Magic Wand. A fast way to select similar

color pixels.

■ Rectangular and Elliptical marquee.

The number one tool for cropping photos.

■ Lasso tool. The most popular tool for

quick, freehand selections.

Later you will see how easy it is to apply different

filters to a selected area with commands such as

Blur and Sharpen. Photoshop and Photoshop

Elements’ palettes, which include Layers, History,

and Navigator, will also be introduced (see

Figure 10.2).

CHAPTER 10 EDITING WITH SELECTION TOOLS 135

You will find some tools

such as Curves do not

appear in Photoshop Elements. If a

tool is not available in Elements, a

workaround is explained later in

this chapter.

FIGURE 10.2
Photoshop’s
palettes.

While you’re experimenting in Photoshop, keep

in mind the most important command: Undo.

Choose Edit, Undo to cancel your last action,

returning the image to its previous state. This

lets you try an effect, then undo it to see how it

looked before. You can choose Edit, Redo to rein-

state the command.

tip

In Photoshop and other

image editors, press Ctrl+Z

to undo, and Ctrl+Z again to

redo the command. Since

version 6 of Photoshop, you

can perform multiple

Undos by pressing

Ctrl+Alt+Z.