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Marquee tools - a Photoshop Guide

Posted: 1 Jan 2001

Marquee tools - a Photoshop Guide - Using Photoshop's Marquee tool to make selections

Marquee tool options menu

Words & Pictures Barry Beckham & David Rowley
The marquee selection tools comprises of several different types of tool. The rectangular marquee tool, elliptical marquee, single row marquee and the single column tool.

The rectangular and elliptical marquee tools can be used to make many different shaped selections. Using the add to selection or subtract from selection you can vary this still further (see below). The single row and single column marquee will add a row or column 1 pixels wide.

In Photoshop 6 when you call up any of the marquee tools we now have the options displayed as above. The same commands are available in Photoshop 5 using shift and drag to add to selection. Alt and drag will subtract from a selection. These shortcuts are still available in Photoshop 6.

Choosing the rectangular marquee tool, clicking and dragging creates a selection. Clicking on the add to selection tab in the options palette or holding down the shift key will allow us to add to that selection. You can add to this selection as many times as you wish. See below. Note......The same applies for the elliptical marquee tool.

Clicking on the subtract from selection tab in the options palette or holding down the alt key will allow us to subtract from our selection.

We can also feather our selection by entering a value in the feather dialogue box. Above we chose a value of 25 this has rounded off the corners of our selection.

If you now fill the selected area with white you can see how the feathering allows the colour to bleedintothebackground.Inverseourselectionselect>inverse and this becomes an ideal tool for creating vignettes.

The elliptical marquee tool gives us one further option, the anti-aliased command. If we make a selection with the anti-aliased unticked we will end up with a saw tooth edge to our selection. Tick the anti-aliased box and our selection will be nice and smooth.