Now I am here in Photoshop on a Windows machine. So I am going to use the shortcut that I mentioned in the last lesson on opening a file. I am just going to double-click on the background. Again, if you are on a Mac, or if you don't want to use the shortcut for some reason, you can go to File, Open or hit Ctrl or Command+O.

So I am just going to double-click the background, and I am going to navigate to my desktop, and then the Project Files, Part 1, Lesson 03, and I am going to open up Selection Primer and hit Open. This is a beautiful photo that was actually taken by Ellison, one of the Total Training employees over in the Bahamas.

So to start out our lesson on selecting, we are going to zoom into this image very closely. Now, as I use my keyboard shortcut that I mentioned in the last segment, where we have Ctrl and spacebar or Command and spacebar, and then clicking, zoom in anywhere on the image where there is a lot of detail, which in this image, it is very hard.

So keep zooming, and even though this is a very beautiful photo, and it's a pretty high quality photo, as we zoom in close enough, we will see all these little squares. These little squares are called Pixels. Now pixel is short for Picture Element. So these little squares are literally the building blocks of your photos inside of Photoshop, and so when we're dealing with Photoshop, primarily we're dealing with the alteration of these little squares.

So of the utmost importance in this process is telling Photoshop which pixels, which little squares that it can fiddle with, and which ones that it needs to leave alone, and we do that by a process called Selecting. Selecting is perhaps one of the most important concepts in Photoshop, depending on what your workflow is.

Selecting is what truly separates the proverbial men from the boys, when you are dealing with professional image alteration. Let's see how this works a little bit. I am going to zoom back out again, by hitting Ctrl+Spacebar+Alt, looks good.

Now we're going to be talking about Filters, but much later on in the Training Series. Just by way of demonstration, I am going to put a filter on this image. I am going to go to the Filter menu at the top, select Blur, and select Gaussian Blur. As we drag this slider over to the right, it will increase the amount of blur applied to our image, and as long as this Preview checkbox is checked, we will see the results of this blur here in the Image window.

So I am going to bump this up, and you can see that it universally blurs every pixel in the document. So I am going to hit Cancel on this, and notice again that, that was with nothing selected. However, if we use one of these selection tools, I am going to go to this one, second one down, hold down my left mouse button, and select rectangular Marquee Tool and let go.

We'll be talking extensively about using the Marquee tools to make selection in the next topic. But for right now, I want to just grab this rectangular Marquee tool, and make a very easy selection by clicking, holding the Mouse down, and dragging down into the right to make a selection area.

These little marching ants indicate that this area, this little box here is selected. Now watch what happens. When I go back to Filter, Blur, Gaussian Blur and apply this blur effect. First of all, let me zoom out in this window by hitting this negative sign here, the Minus (-) sign.

Now as we blur this more, you will see that only what is within this selection border, gets edited, it gets blurred, everything else is protected. So again, only what we have selected, is what Photoshop has permission to adjust. If something is not selected, it does not have permission to adjust those pixels. So selecting is tantamount to working effectively in Photoshop.

So let's now get into some of these tools and figure out how they work. I am going to hit Cancel on this dialog box, and I am going to hit Ctrl+D or Command+D on the Mac to deselect. Again, it's a keyboard shortcut that we're going to be going back to over and over again, and you can go to the Select menu if you can't remember that shortcut, and it's right here under Delesect. So let's go and talk about some of these Marquee tools that I briefly mentioned moments ago.