The most fundamental skill that you need inside of Adobe Photoshop is having the ability to make selections. Remember, all of your images are composed of pixels. Having the ability to isolate certain pixels ultimately gives you the control over what you're going to do with that image.

So what I'd like to do is just review some of the basic Selection tools to get you off and running. You'll notice here inside the Tools panel we have the Rectangular Marquee tool.

Underneath this tool are some hidden tools. We have the Elliptical Marquee tool. And then we have a Single Row Marquee tool and a Single Column Marquee tool. These two tools are best used when dealing with web design.

So what I'd like to do is choose the Rectangular Marquee tool and select this square. To select it, all you have to do is click and drag. Notice you get a little head's up display telling you the width and the height of your selection. If you hold down the shift key, you'll constrain it to a square so both the width and the height are the same.

When you let go of the mouse, you have your selection. And you can see, you have a series of marching ants which represent the selected area. Now if you want to deselect this, meaning you no longer want these pixels to be selected, you can come up to the Select menu. And from there you can choose Deselect. Command D is the keyboard shortcut here on the Mac. It would be Control D on Windows.

So there's the Rectangular Marquee Selection tool, but what about the Elliptical Marquee tool? Well, it too behaves much in the same way. If you click and drag, you can create a circle or an elliptical type of selection. Now in this case, you may want to create the selection out from the center. I'm going to go ahead and deselect this, Command D or Control D. To drag out a selection from the center, simply hold down the Option key on the Mac,Alt on Windows, and you'll notice you're dragging out from the center at this point. And again, you've successfully made a selection.

Now you can move the selection by placing your cursor inside of it, clicking and dragging, or using the arrow keys on your keyboard to nudge it around. So what about a more difficult shape, like this triangle?

Let's go ahead and deselect this circle. Command D or Control D will do that. You could always come over and choose the Lasso tool. The Lasso tool really is best used for organic areas or adding or subtracting from an existing selection. It's a freehand selection tool, so I'm not good enough to click and drag a triangle, but I can attempt it. When I let go of the mouse, this is the selection. It's really not the best. So I'm going to go ahead and deselect that, Command D or Control D.

Your best bet is to use something like the Polygonal Lasso tool. This gives you the ability to create precise lines with angles. For example, if I click here and then drag up, I can click again and then continue to drag, click again and then continue to drag and close the path by coming back to the beginning or double clicking the mouse. And that will close the selection.

So the Polygonal Lasso tool is better suited for objects that really can't be selected using the Elliptical or Rectangular Marquee tools and aren't organic enough to justify using the traditional Lasso tool. So I'm going to go ahead and deselect that.

There is another tool hidden underneath that which is the Magnetic Lasso tool, which allows Photoshop to compare the edge of the foreground object from the background object. I'm not going to go ahead and review that right now.

Instead what I want to take a look at is another Selection tool called the Quick Selection tool. The Quick Selection tool gives you the ability to make selections based upon color. So in this case if I wanted to select the white background, with the Quick Selection tool all you have to do is come over here and make sure that you have the New Selection option highlighted here in the Options bar. Then just click and drag. And you just want to make sure that you stay within the white area. And as you drag, you'll notice you're selecting the white pixels.

Now if you get careless and select something by accident, you can always come over and choose this option, which is Subtract From Selection. Or you can use any one of the other Selection tools to subtract from your selection.

So making selections inside of Photoshop, like I said, is a fundamental skill. And these tools are tools that you'll use all the time to create these selections.