The marquee tools are great for selecting regular shaped regions of an image.

 

 

You can choose from a rectangular marquee, an elliptical marquee, a single row marquee, and a single column marquee. Just click the marquee tool of your choice, and use your mouse pointer to drag the selection into shape over the image. When you release the left mouse button, the selection is complete.

 

Here is an image from the Photoshop sample folder, with an elliptical marquee applied to make a selection.

 

Once again, if you right click inside the image, a menu will appear with options for working with your selection.

 

When using the elliptical marquee, try to drag your mouse in a straight line first, giving your ellipse the length or width that you think it will need, and then move your mouse across or down to widen the ellipse in the other direction. This will make it easier to control the shapes of your elliptical marquees.

 

The following image shows a rectangular marquee.

 

 

You use the rectangular marquee in the same way that you use the elliptical marquee. First you must select the rectangular marquee tool, and then drag your mouse pointer over the image to make a selection. When you release your mouse button, the selection is complete.

 

If you right click in the image you will see a menu of options as before.

 

If you make a rectangular selection, and then place your mouse pointer inside the selection, you can drag the selection around the canvas to reposition it (hold left mouse button to drag). This technique will also work with elliptical selections, lasso selections, and magic wand selections as well.

 

The single row marquee and the single column marquee are for making selections across or down the picture that are one pixel wide. Don’t worry about the exact definition of pixels just yet. For now, just consider a single pixel as the narrowest width that you can select from an image. To make a single column or single row selection, select the single row or single column tool from the marquee tools group, and then click on the image at the point where you want your row or column to dissect it. Remember, a row selection will go across the image horizontally, and a column selection will go up and down the image vertically

 

 You can make these row and column selections wider than one pixel by choosing Select ->Modify->Expand from the menu bar after you make the selection. This will result in the following dialog box.

 

 

Just enter a specific number of pixels in the field provided and click OK to widen the selection by that number.

 

Here is the same image showing a single column selection.

 

 

If you place your mouse pointer on the image and right click, you will see the menu of selection options just as with the other selection tools.