- Selecting Square, Rectangular, or Round Areas
- Saving Your Selections
- Softening Those Harsh Edges
- Selecting Areas by Their Color
- Making Selections Using a Brush
- Getting Elements to Help You Make Tricky Selections
- Easier Selections with the Quick Selection Tool
- Removing People (or Objects) from Backgrounds
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Saving Your Selections
If you’ve spent 15 or 20 minutes (or even longer) putting together an intricate selection, once you deselect it, it’s gone. (Well, you might be able to get it back by choosing Reselect from the Select menu, as long as you haven’t made any other selections in the meantime, but don’t count on it. Ever.) Here’s how to save your finely-honed selections and bring them back into place anytime you need them.
Step One:
Open an image and then put a selection around an object in your photo using the tool of your choice. Here I used the Quick Selection tool (A) to select the sky, then went under the Select menu and chose Inverse to select the mountains and lake. Then, I Alt-clicked (Mac: Option-clicked) on the sky’s reflection to remove it from the selection. To save your selection once it’s in place (so you can use it again later), go under the Select menu and choose Save Selection. This brings up the Save Selection dialog. Enter a name in the Name field and click OK to save your selection.
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Step Two:
Now you can get that selection back (known as “reloading” by Elements wizards) at any time by going to the Select menu and choosing Load Selection. If you’ve saved more than one selection, they’ll be listed in the Selection pop-up menu—just choose which one you want to “load” and click OK. The saved selection will appear in your image.
