I am beginning a series of Adobe Photoshop tutorials. Originally this was for my mom who is new to Photoshop, but as I was preparing today's tutorial I realized (duh!) that there is still much I can learn and doing tutorials will help me learn new things too.
I am using Photoshop 5.5. I'd be interested to know if this tutorial is similar to later versions of Photoshop, or if I've missed any tricks and effects you have discovered.
Marquee Tool
The marquee tool might not be what you think of as a complex tool, but no doubt about it, it is one of the tools you'll use the most in Photoshop. I wondered what I might be missing, so I played and read the online help for it.
The marquee is the tool on the top left. It allows you to select portions of your image, marking your selection with the little marching ants outlining it. After you have selected a portion of your image you can crop, copy to the memory clipboard, apply effects to just that portion of the image, etc.
The vast majority of the time I'm using marquee to crop my image.
If you left click on the default marquee box, you'll see more marquee options fly out, like this:
Left to right these are the rectangular, elliptical, single pixel horizontal, single pixel vertical, and crop marquee tools.
I'll go ahead and get the two single pixel tools out of the way. They allow you to select a single pixel width or height. I haven't had much use for those options. (Have you?)
Perfect Squares & CirclesThe rectangular and elliptical are my most used. Of course, with either tool you can free-form it by left-clicking and dragging to create your selection. Did you know, though, that while left-clicking and pressing SHIFT, you can restrain the rectangular option so it is a perfect square, or SHIFT with the elliptical option to make a perfect circle.
You could press ALT, which changes the drag option starting from the left top corner to instead starting your drag outward from the center. I find this especially helpful with the elliptical option.
And here's something fabulous I learned today -- you can press SHIFT and ALT at the same time while left-clicking and dragging so that you are creating a perfect square or circle dragging outward from the center of your selection.
Other Styles for Rectangular and Elliptical marqueesThe rectangular and elliptical marquees also give you some other options, seen in the Options box. (If you don't see your option box, select View > Show Options). That box, by default looks like this:
Feather is what you think it is. I don't use it much, but a value other than zero feathers your outside edges so they are soft, rather than sharp.
But there are two other options in the Style drop down box that I found very interesting today:
The Constrained Aspect Ratio allows you to enter things like width = 2 and height = 1, for a double wide X single high selection. You can still drag your selection to whatever size you like, but it will keep the box (or ellipse) in that ratio. You can see I entered 600 by 450, but that doesn't mean it will force that dimension, but rather that ratio. So I might end up with a marquee selection of, say, 200 X 150, or 60 X 45.
The Fixed Size could be very handy too. In this case you are entering the exact dimension you want. No dragging to fiddle with your size, instead with a click you have the instant size you entered in the width and height. I can see how this would be handy if you were wanting to grab a bunch of crops and have them all the same size. (Previously I would create the size I wanted and then kept moving that marquee around. This could be better, I think.)
Crop marqueeI have never used the crop marquee, but after working with I now see I was missing a tool I could use effectively and frequently. This tool will allow me to not only crop but also resize (down from the 2560X1920 size from my camera to 600X450 I use for most posts here) in one go.
The cool thing is that it allows me to drag my marquee, not only keeping this ratio, but when I press the crop marquee tool again, it instantly resizes the cropped image to that selection in that pixel size (and resolution depth).
Compare this to my steps before when I wanted to crop an image and to have it result in 600X450:
- Eye-ball the image to get an idea of where I would want to crop it, say roughly 2/3 of the current image.
- Resize the image from 2560X1920 to 900X675, which is 1/3 size larger than 600X450. Already you can see ugly math is involved.
- Open a new blank image sized at 600X450. Go to Select > All.
- Drag that marquee to the first image and place it where I want.
- Crop.
And frequently, it wouldn't be quite right. I would then do the steps again, adjusting my eyeball size again, more rough math, etc.
With crop tool, I can do this more precisely and can do it in virtually one step. Select crop marquee (and it keeps my settings from one time to the next, so I don't have to set the 600X450 pixels each time), drag my marquee to the part of the image I want. When I like it, press the marquee tool again. It does all the other steps for me.
SummaryThe Marquee tool might not be the most exciting of the tools, but it's on the top left for a reason -- it's one you'll be using frequently. And after playing and learning today, I think I have found more effective ways to make those little marching ants do my bidding.
Here's a "Various Extra" treat for readers tonight. My afternoon pick-me-up today was
I'm very touched at having received these two awards from 
