Making Selections - Photoshop Elements 13: The Missing Manual - page 226

▪ Hide/View a Selection (Ctrl+H/ ⌘ -H) keeps your selection active while hiding its out-
line. This is handy because sometimes the marching ants can be distracting or make it
hard to see what you're doing. To bring back the ants, just press Ctrl+H/ ⌘ -H again.
TIP
If a tool acts goofy or won't do anything, start your troubleshooting by pressing Ctrl+H/
⌘ -H to make sure you don't have a hidden selection you forgot about.
Selecting Rectangular and Elliptical Areas
Selecting a whole photo is all well and good, but many times your reason for making a selec-
tion is precisely because you don't want to make changes to the whole image. So how do you
select just part of a picture?
The easiest way is to use the Marquee tools. You already met the Rectangular Marquee tool
back in Chapter 3 in the section on cropping ( Cropping Pictures ). If you want to select a
block, circle, or oval in an image, the Marquee tools are the way to go. As the winners of the
Most Frequently Used Selection Tools award, they get top spot in the Select section of the
Editor's Tools panel in Expert mode. You can modify how they work, like telling them to
create a square instead of a rectangle, as Figure 5-2 explains. Here's how to use them:
1. Press M or click the Marquee tools' icon in the Tools panel .
The Rectangular Marquee tool is the dotted rectangle at the upper right of the Tools
panel's Select section. (If you used the Elliptical Marquee tool last, you see a dotted
oval instead.)
2. Choose the shape you want to draw: a rectangle or an ellipse .
At the left end of the Tool Options area, click the rectangle or the ellipse to pick a
shape, or just tap the M key again to switch between the two shapes.
3. If you want Elements to soften the selection's outline, in the Tool Options area,
adjust the Feather slider .
Feathering makes the edges of a selection softer or fuzzier for better blending (when
you're trying, say, to replace Brad Pitt's face with yours). The box on Feathering and
Anti-Aliasing explains how feathering works.