When you are working inside of Photoshop, one of the most important things that you need to know is how to utilize Photoshop Selection Tools, because selections are probably the most important thing that you are going to do inside of Photoshop, because a lot of the basis for the effects, the masking and everything like that, that you do, is based upon how you utilize the selection tools.

Now by default Photoshop selection tools are broken down into this group right up here in the top of the toolbar, and so what you have inside of this toolbar are the Marquee tools which consist of the Rectangular Marquee tool, which just draws out squares and rectangles. You also have the Elliptical Marquee tool, the Single Row Marquee tool and the Single Column Marquee tool.

So these are just all the different selection tools that are built into the Marquee tool flyout box here. So anytime you see these little triangles in the bottom right-hand corner of a tool, that means that there are more than one tool housed inside of that particular toolbox.

For instance here you have the Lasso tools and by clicking hold on that, you'll see that inside there, you have the regular Lasso tool, the Polygonal Lasso tool and the Magnetic Lasso tool. All of those can be accessed by hitting the L key on your keyboard.

However, if you don't have one of the options turned off inside of your Preferences, you won't be able to quickly access that, you will have to throw in your Shift key. So I will show you how to get rid of that really quick. So I will go ahead and now I hit Command+K on the Mac, Ctrl+K on the PC and inside of the General Preferences dialog box, what you want to go ahead and do is turn off Use shift key for tool switch, and then once you have that done, go ahead and hit OK, and then you'll notice if I just tap the letter L on my keyboard, I can cycle through each one of those different tools like so.

If I hadn't turned that option off, I would have to hold down the Shift key to cycle through those. So that's just a way of getting a little bit faster when accessing these tools. Now the last round of tools here is your Wand tools which consist of the Magic Wand tool, but now I would like to call it the Tragic Wand tool, because it really does a poor job of selecting, but we'll get to that in just a moment.

Also the new feature in Photoshop CS3, the Quick Selection tool. So all of these different tools have many functions that are useful for making selections here inside of Photoshop. So now in these next few lessons, we're going to take a look at exactly when you would use certain tools and how to use those tools, so that you can create the best possible selection for your image.