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

Knowing how to get your selections just right will save you hours of hair-pulling. So, in an effort to keep our hair on our heads this Christmas, let's explore some simple selection tips that will get you on the right path to making the perfect selection.

First off, when you're using the Marquee tool, you can hold the Spacebar (but don't release the mouse) to move the selection around your screen before you finish making it. That can make it much easier to select round objects where Photoshop forces you to click on corners, forcing you to think of circles as squares.

In Photoshop 5.5, the Marquee tool's Fixed Size option was always measured in pixels. In 6.0, you can type "In" for Inches, "px" for pixels, "cm" for centimeters, "mm" for millimeters, or "pica" for picas.

To round the corners of a rectangular selection, choose Select>Modify>Smooth.

When using the Lasso tool to select an object, you can hold the spacebar (but don't release the mouse button) and drag to scroll around your screen. That can be useful if you are zoomed in on your image and can't see the whole thing on your screen.

When using the Magic Wand tool, it is often easier to select what you don't want and then choose Select>Inverse to switch over to what you wanted to select in the first place. If the Magic Wand doesn't select enough on the first click, then hold the Shift key and click in another area to add to the selection.

The Select>Grow command will expand a selection to include colors that are similar to the ones that are already selected. The Select>Similar command does the same as grow, but it looks across the entire document to find colors, instead of limiting itself to colors that touch each other in a continuous blob. The Grow and Similar commands under the Select menu use the Tolerance setting of the Magic wand tool to determine the range of color they will select.

You can drag a selection (I'm talking about just the marching ants and not the actual image) between documents if you click in the middle of the selection using the Marquee tool and then drag it to another document. If you hold Shift, Photoshop will center the selection within the second document, or place it in the same position as the original if the two documents are the same size.

That should do it for this week. If you didn't receive last week's tip, that's because I had some problems with the mass e-mail program that I use, so not everyone received their tip. You can find last week's tip at www.digitalmastery.com/tips

I want to take this chance to thank everyone who has been apart of this list (including GNR's) and wish everyone a happy holiday season. Talk to you after Christmas.

-Ben Willmore
Founder, Digital Mastery