Selections

Selections

Many operations in Photoshop start with a selection, or are affected by whether an area is selected or not. So, before you start your next task or if something just isn't working properly, here are a few questions to ask yourself about selections:

• Did you forget that you had something selected?

• Did you mean to select something first, and didn't?

• Is there too much feather, not enough feather, or no feather?

• Did you forget that you chose to hide the selection, so you can't see the selection edges anymore (View>Extras)?

• Are the Options Bar settings correct for the selection tool you're using?

• Are you on the correct layer?

If you think that part of the problem might be that you have the wrong area selected, or you just want to make sure that nothing is selected, press Command-D (PC: Control-D). That is the shortcut to deselect and is the quickest way to make sure that nothing is selected, even if you can't see the selection edges (a.k.a. marching ants ).