Selections

A selection limits what the painting tools, the adjustments, the filters and Edit ▸ Fill, Cut, Copy and Clear touch. It is shown as marching ants; a feathered selection fades at its edge, so an edit there applies with partial strength.

Making a selection

• Rectangular Marquee / Elliptical Marquee (M): drag on the canvas.
• Lasso (L): draw a free shape; Polygonal Lasso: click corner by corner.
• Magic Wand (W): click a colour to select the pixels like it, within the Tolerance set in the Options bar; Contiguous limits it to the connected area.
• Hold Shift while starting a new selection to add to the current one, Alt to subtract from it, Shift+Alt to keep only the intersection.
• The Options bar of these tools holds the Feather amount and the anti-aliasing switch.

Select menu

• All (Ctrl+A), None (Ctrl+D), Reselect (Ctrl+Shift+D), Inverse (Ctrl+Shift+I).
• All Layers (Ctrl+Alt+A) selects every layer in the Layers palette.
• Grow (Ctrl+G) and Similar extend the selection to neighbouring, or to all, pixels of similar colour (the Magic Wand's tolerance).
• Fringe… selects a band along the current edge; Feather… softens the edge by the radius you give.
• Defringe… removes the halo left around pasted pixels.
• Hide Edges (Ctrl+H) hides the marching ants without dropping the selection; the same row reads Show Edges afterwards.

Quick Mask

Select ▸ Edit in Quick Mask Mode (or Q) shows the selection as a translucent overlay you can paint with the Brush, the Eraser or any painting tool; painting grows or shrinks the selection. Choose the row again (Edit in Standard Mode) or press Q to return to marching ants.

Working with the selected pixels

• Edit ▸ Cut, Copy (Ctrl+X, Ctrl+C), Copy Merged (Ctrl+Shift+C, all visible layers), Paste (Ctrl+V, into a new layer), Paste Into (Ctrl+Shift+V, masked by the selection), Paste Behind (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+V).
• Edit ▸ Clear, Fill… and Stroke….
• Edit ▸ Crop trims the document to a rectangular selection.
• Edit ▸ Free Transform (Ctrl+T) scales, moves and rotates the selected pixels — or the whole layer when nothing is selected — with Enter to commit and Esc to cancel; Edit ▸ Transform ▸ rotates by 90° or 180° and flips.
• Layer ▸ New ▸ Layer Via Copy / Layer Via Cut lift the selected pixels onto a layer of their own; Layer ▸ Layer Mask ▸ Reveal Selection turns the selection into a mask.

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