OGONG'S WONDER GIRLS & PHOTOSHOP BLOG

Selecting(1/3): Using Marquee tools

This is the first chapter (or the first post except introduction) of "Photoshop Basics with Wonder Girls Examples." I'm really excited. This series would be great fun to you and me altogether. Let's start from selecting a part of an image.

The simplest way of selecting might me using the Marquee tools. In this post I'm going to explain about the Rectangular Marquee tool and the Elliptical Marquee tool. As the names reveal themselves, they select rectangular and elliptical areas respectively.

I opened an image of Wonder Girls. This image is one of concept images for their fourth album, Nobody.

You can open an image by several ways. (Whenever I tell you keyboard shortcuts, I'll indicate it by green text.)
- Click File -> Open in the menu bar
- Press Ctrl+O
- Double click the gray background of Photoshop
- Drag an icon of a picture to the gray background of Photoshop

To select the Marquee tool, I clicked a rectangle formed with dotted line in the tool palette at the left of the screen. Alternatively, you can press M key on your keyboard. The Rectangular Marquee tool is selected by default. To change to other Marquee tools, click and hold the Marquee tool icon (a rectangle formed with dotted line) in the tool palette or right-lick the icon.

After I selected the Rectangular Marquee tool, I dragged the mouse pointer and made a rectangle with dotted line on the image. That's it. I selected that area. Using the Elliptical Marquee tool is the same. Drag and make an ellipse, then you've selected that area.

Once you make a selection, you can add to, subtract from, and intersect with the selection.
- To add, Shift+drag (press and hold Shift key and drag) and make another selection
- To subtract, Alt+drag and make another selection
- To intersect, Shift+Alt+drag and make another selection

Also you can move a selection.
- To move a selection line only, click inside the selection and drag.
- To move a selected area, Ctrl+click inside the selection and drag.
- To copy a selected area, Ctrl+Alt+click inside the selection and drag.
(If you press and hold Shift key while you move or copy a selection, the movement is constrained to 45 degree increments.) 

When you make a selection, you can soften the edge by using Feather option in the option bar. In the picture above I selected YooBin and SunYe on the left with no feathering, and SoHee, YeEun, and SunMi on the right with feathering of 30 px. Now you see the soft edge on the right.

In order to make the effect of feathering noticeable, I deleted the unselected area. (If I hadn't deleted it, you wouldn't have been able to see the effect.) Here's how I did that. After selecting Wonder Girls, I pressed Ctrl+Shift+I to invert the selection and pressed Delete key to delete it.

If you want to clear a selection you made, press Ctrl+D. Also if you want to select an entire image, press Ctrl+A.


Okay, now we know how to select rectangular and elliptical areas. What do we do with these selections? We can do many things of course. A simple thing is to make your own banner like this one below.

I used crop, stroke, and text tools which I will explain later in this series. But if you explore tools in Photoshop, you will easily figure out how to make a simple banner like this.

Next time, I will tell you how to use the Lasso and the Quick Mask tools to make a selection. Those tools will enable you to select more complicated areas.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence.

As I wrote down under the picture at the side bar, in which SoHee is catching dragonflies, it’s so amusing to compose Wonder Girls pictures with Photoshop. Photoshop itself is interesting enough, but when I use Photoshop to edit pictures of people I like (in my case Wonder Girls) it is still more interesting. Because I have experienced so much fun through using Photoshop, I decided to share it with many people on the Web. That’s the reason why I’m writing serial posts entitled “Photoshop Basics with Wonder Girls Examples.”

It is evident from the title of this post that through this series I’m going to talk about basic Photoshop skills suitable for hobbyists. Beginners, even people who use Photoshop for the first time, might be able to understand and practice the contents of this series easily. But don’t think little of those because most of you will probably find those interesting and some of those useful. Also you will not be feeling bored because I will use pictures of Wonder Girls, who are so cute, to show examples.

I will use Photoshop CS3 (and my computer operating system is Windows). It’s not a problem if you have a different version because functionality is almost the same. If you are familiar with the workspace of Photoshop and know some keyboard shortcuts, that’s great. But you have nothing to worry if not. I tell you every single step of how to do the work in a post.

Here’s the plan of “Photoshop Basics with Wonder Girls Examples” series. A chapter might be devided into several posts.

1. Selecting
2. Transforming
3. Drawing with Vectors
4. Using Layers
5. Composing Images
6. Filters and Layer Styles
7. Creating and Formatting Text
8. Special Text Effects
9. Making Repairs
10. Controlling Tone
11. Adjusting Color

I’ll write one post or two posts a week. I hope that people who are interested in Photoshop or Wonder Girls or both will read this series joyfully and create their own work amusingly.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence.

Finally, JYP entertainment released the music video trailer of Wonder Girls' fourth album, which is titled Wonder Girls Nobody. It's a ballad this time, so I'm expecting them to show their talented vocals. Also, Wonder Girls are beautiful in this trailer. (They looks somewhat like Dream Girls.)