The Photoshop Tip of the Week for the Clients and Friends of Ben Willmore (www.digitalmastery.com):

Making good selections is so essential to working successfully in Photoshop, that this week we're going to revisit the subject and learn more about how to make those surgically precise selections that we all dream of.

Did you know that you could create straight lines when using the Lasso tool by holding the Option key (Macintosh), or Alt (Windows) and then clicking in multiple areas? You can also hold the Spacebar to scroll around your image while you are still in the middle of making a selection.

If you ever have trouble creating elliptical selections that match the shape of an object, then next time, give this a try: First make a selection larger than what you'll need using Elliptical Marquee. Next, choose Select>Transform Selection and then move the anchor points that appear until they match the shape you are working with. Finally, press Enter to finalize the transformed selection.

If you haven't upgraded to Photoshop 6.0 yet and you need to create a selection in the shape of some text, then forget about Photoshop's Type Mask Tool (which doesn't give you any on-screen preview in 5.5) and try this instead: Use the "normal" Type tool and then Command-click (Macintosh), Ctrl-Click (Windows) the Type layer that is created. Once the selection appears, you can drag the Type layer to the trash.

When I use the Magic Wand tool to select the background of an image, I often get a bunch of single pixel selections that I don't want (I can them twinklers, because they just seem to flash on and off with the marching ants). To get rid twinklers, choose Select>Modify>Smooth and use a setting of 1.

When using the Magnetic Lasso tool keep in mind the following tips: Press Caps Lock to turn your cursor into a circle that indicates how large of an area the tool is looking in. Type [ or ] to change the size of the circle. Hold down the Option key (Macintosh), or Alt key (Windows) and drag to temporarily switch to the normal Lasso tool. Press Escape to cancel a selection. Click to manually add an anchor point.

If you are using Photoshop 6.0 beware of the Marquee Tool bug. If you click and drag upwards with the Marquee tool in 6.0, your selection will be one pixel off from where you actually clicked. This doesn't happen if you click and then drag downwards. I don't know how to fix that problem, but I thought you might want to be aware of it.

We'll cover more selection tips in the future, but I hope this is enough to make your week a little easier. Talk to you next week.

-Ben Willmore
Founder, Digital Mastery