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Mahalo expert Gene Shaw gives a comprehensive Photoshop select menu tutorial.
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About the Select Menu
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The Select Menu is going to help us work with specific areas of your image without affecting the entire composition. You can highlight an area of your image and create an Instant Mask. You can also use these same Selection tools to duplicate parts of your image and to create borders and special effects. You can select different colors or shapes and you can easily alter both the selection and the area you have selected. 

Select Menu Options 1
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The All option selects the entire image, Deselect makes no selection, Reselect restores the most recent selection and Inverse selects the opposite areas based on what is currently selected. 
Similar Layers will highlight all the same type of layers. It doesn't look at what is on the layer, so if you have four blue layers and a red layer, all five layers will be selected.  If, however, two of your blue layers are blue due to custom shapes filling the screen, and the other two are simply blue from paint, then it will leave two of these blue layers out. 

Adjustment Layers, Mask Layers, Regular Layers, Custom Shapes and Smart Objects are grouped separately. This will make it that much easier to access them. 

Color Range is the last of the selection options. When you select this it opens a new menu that has options to refine your color selection. You choose a color and it will highlight that color everywhere it appears in the image. When you get the to second half of the Select menu, these options can further refine anything you have selected.

Select Menu Options 2
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Refine Edge is great at selecting fine details such as hair. The Modify sub-menu has a few other options to mechanically refine your selection. The Grow option will extend the tolerance of your selection. For example, if you select an area that is dark blue, Grow will add a slightly lighter blue to your selection. If you were to instead hit Similar, then all instances of that dark blue in the entire image would be selected. Transform Selection allows you to use the Free Transform tool on your selection without it affecting the selected area.

Select Menu Options 3
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Quick Mask allows you to set up a mask by painting out an area. Simply hit the Edit in Quick Mask option and then fill in anywhere you would like to be masked-out. Then select it again and your selection will be set to the area that you colored in. You can save and load your selections for later retrieval. 

Read more by visiting our page at:
http://www.mahalo.com/learn-adobe-photoshop-select-menu/