Selections

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Selections

Some useful things you might not know about selection

If you want to select an area the same shape as a layer, hold CTRL and click on the layer thumbnail.

The selection tool is not restricted to a binary choice between an area that is selected and an area that is not. You can have semi-transparent selections:



-        On an empty layer make a gradient from opaque to transparent.

-        Use free transform (Ctrl+T)   shrink it. Hold Shift when resizing to maintain the proporthion.

If you haven’t used  free transform yet, it lets you resize, skew and distort the selected layer. 

Click and drag a corner point to resize, Ctrl click and drag a corner point to affect just that corner, Ctrl click and drag on any side to skew the whole layer. Move the cursor near a corner and you get a rotate option. Hold SHIFT when rotating to snap to more useful angles.

If you have a recent version of photoshop, you should see a icon in the toolbar. This lets you distort the layer using a mesh warp.

-        Ctrl click on the layer thumbnail. – it seems that the selection is just a rectangle but actually the full gradient is selected. The selection dotted line only shows you pixels that are more than 50% opaque. The less transparent pixels are selected, you just can’t see that yet.

-        Turn off the layer and make a new empty layer

-        Pick a new color and use Alt+Backspace to fill the selection with foreground color (use Ctrl+Backspace to fill with background color) - press Ctrl+D to deselect and notice that the opacity is identical to that of the original Layer.

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