San's Graphic Blog

Rectangle and Oval Marquee tool is great for quick geometric selection for drawing shapes, creating boarders, outlining geometric object in a photo etc...

Hit M on keyboard to activate the Marquee tool, hold Shift + M to switch between Rectangle and Oval Marquee.

Click and drag to draw your marquee, do not worry if you can’t get the exact location the first time there are several tricks you can use to position your marquee.

The first set of icon is the add/subtract/intersect icons. You can also add selection by holding Shift while making another selection. You can subtract a selection by holding Alt/Option while making another selection. You can create intersection selection from two different selections by holding Shift+Alt/Option on the second selection.

Feathering will smooth out the edge for a softer more natural look

With the Anti-alias on, your selection will have a soft blur to create the illusion of smoother edge.

You can also create a fixed size or fixed ratio marquee.

Hold Shift for perfect square or circle instead of rectangle or oval shapes.

Hold Alt/Option while drawing a marquee, where you make the first click becomes the center of your shape instead of the corner.

You do not need to worry about aligning your marquee shape to your photo the moment you draw it. Go ahead and create the selection anywhere on the canvas and while your mouse is still held down, hold the SPACE button and you will be able to move the marquee around. After you release the Space button you can continue resizing the marquee.

You can also move the selection after you’ve released your mouse by simply clicking and dragging it.

Activate Move too (V) if you want to cut the content within the marquee tool, it will cut whatever that is in the layer and let you reposition it to another location of same layer.

Read my articles on Refine Edge to learn how to fine tune your selection after you are done with it. Read my article about Refine Edge here.

This is part of my tutorial set, please visit the tutorial page for a list of all the tutorials.

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