Tutorial: Area Selection

Here we will look at ways of selecting an area of an image, with a view to manipulating that seperate area of the image.

Firstly we shall start with selecting the whole image.

To select the whole image, simply select the "Rectangular Marquee" Tool from the tool window, then place the mouse cursor at one of the image corners, hold down the left mouse button and pull the selection box down to cover either part of the image or the whole image. You will see the area that you selected is surrounded by a moving line of "marching ants". If you selected part of the image, you can move your selection box around by putting the cursor into the selected area, then holding the left mouse button down and using the mouse to move the selction box whilst the button is down.

This technique would be useful, for example, for copying the image to the clip board and pasting it into a new image, or pasting multiple presized images onto a new background for printing, eg, for passport photos.