Advanced Selection Techniques - Advanced Adobe Photoshop CC - page 42

Building a selection
In this exercise, you have the opportunity of trying out some of the marquee tool tips. You will then take
the selection a little further by saving and transforming the marquee selection.
1 With the advps0301_work image open, select the Elliptical Marquee tool.
2 Press and hold the Alt+Shift (Windows) or Option+Shift (Mac OS) keys, and then click the center of
the clock face, where the base of the hands meet.
3 Click and drag outwards; notice that you selection starts from the center, rather than from one of the
corners (which is the default). This can be very helpful when making selections of people (start with
the nose) or objects such as wheels.
4 If the circle is not exactly up to the edge of the clock face, take your cursor (while you still have the
Elliptical marquee selected) and click and drag to reposition it. The clock face is not perfectly circular,
so do not worry if your marquee selection does not match up exactly.
Click and drag from the center while holding the Alt/Option+Shift keys.
5 Choose File > Save. Keep the selection active and the file open.
Transforming your selection
A little known feature is the opportunity to scale, rotate, and even distort an existing selection. In this
next part of the lesson, you scale the elliptical selection you just made. Right now you will change the se-
lection so that it surrounds the entire clock.
1 With your selection still active, choose Select > Transform Selection; handles appear that you can use
to adjust the selection.
2 Click the transform handles and drag in or out to better fit your selection to the clock face.