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[ 85 ]perspective to the geometry of a form you’re trying to
select. We’ll use this image of a car as an example. If you’d
like to download the low-res watermarked version of this
image to follow along, click this link, log in with your
Adobe ID, and click the Save to Library button. Double-
click the image in the Libraries panel (Window>Libraries)
to open it in Photoshop.
In this image, let’s assume we need to make a selection
of the rear wheel. How would you go about it? Many people
would trace it with the Pen tool (P), or maybe try the Mag-
netic Lasso tool. There are definitely some tonal differences
that make it possible to use other selection tools, but we
know that this wheel is elliptical in its geometric form. Once
that circular wheel is turned in a perspective angle from the
viewing lens, it becomes an ellipse. But perspective does
some tricky things when shapes are distorted into that view.
This is where we can utilize the accuracy of a basic geomet-
ric form, in this case, the Elliptical Marquee tool, and then
we can use a Transform choice to make it match the right
viewing angle.
For this type of selection, it’s always helpful to start
by adding guides. For the outer area of the wheel, drag
guides from your rulers (if you can’t see your rulers, go towant to learn more and get really advanced with transfor-
mations, check out my feature article in Photoshop User
magazine on warping.TRANSFORMING SELECTIONS
If this is a selections article, what does all this have to do
with selections? Well, as it turns out, you can apply all of
these types of transformations to any selection you make
without editing the pixels on the layer. This can be super-
handy in many ways, whether you need to just nudge
and tweak the form of your selection, or if there’s some©Adobe Stock/Cla78