How to turn your Object Drawing into a Selection in Photoshop

One of the most helpful tools in Photoshop, espcially if you use it to create your own custom objects(web graphics, buttons etc.) is the ability to take the object you drew and turn it into a selection. In this tutorial you will see how that is done.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Adobe Photoshop CS4

1. 

   Launch Adobe Photoshop CS4 and create a new project and set the dimensions of your canvass to 200x 200.

2. 

   Using the shape tool, draw an object onto your canvas. The shape you choose is irrelevant, but if you want to follow along exactly with this tutorial, choose the ellipse tool.

3. 

   Rasterize your layer, by right clicking on the layer in your layers panel and select "Rasterize Layer" from the pop up menu.

4. You now have the object right where you want it (so to speak). The final step is to hold down the CTRL button and move the mouse over the image thumbnail in the layers panel. You will see the mouse turn into a hand with a small box in the lower right corner of the mouse cursor (unforunately I can not get a screen shot of it). When you see your mouse cursor change to what I described above, left click your mouse.

5. 

   You should now see a selection around your object in the form of a dashed line that looks like it is marching around the object. At this point it would be best to save the selection for later use, and to do that you click "Select", then "Save Selection". The ability to create this selection is an invaluable tool when you are creating custom objects.

[jull14]

on 4/24/2009 The article on How to turn your Object Drawing into a Selection in Photoshop is very important for any person wishing to create a new project using photoshop, I am so glad you wrote this article, thanks for sharing with me. Julia