Losing Selections, Saving Selections

... Nothing's more frustrating than losing a complicated selection... here's what to do

greg from california, USA, using photoshop 7 with windows xp, writes in with:

[Quote:] I'm really getting irritated -- as soon as I spend twenty minutes outlining a complicated piece of art, I mistakenly de-select or click the wrong place and have to start again! There must be an easier way

Photoshop 911:

All you have to do is either use the QuickMask command, or Save your selections for future use

We've all done it:

... created a selection and deselected it only to discover you need the selection again... or, worse yet, had to start from scratch.

Rather than wasting time reselecting it all over again, just save your selection.

* Make your selection
* While it's still active, choose Select > Save Selection.

In the resulting Save Selection dialog box, name the selection and click OK.

Now, when you need to access that selection, choose Select > Load Selection. In the resulting dialog box, choose your saved selection from the Channel pop-up menu and click OK.

In complicated situations, save the selections at various stages.

Remember you can use QuickMask as a "temporary" selections arena that will not go away simply by clicking elsewhere. You can work on it until the selection is correct, then use the above to save the selection.

(Use the search field on this page and search for "QuickMask" to get other tutorials that will help.

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Comments

[Joe]

Though I find saving selections to be a useful tool in many cases, solving the problem of accidentally clicking out of a long selection process is much easier. You can use the Undo (Control/Command + Z) function to just revert to the way the selection was before that click. Ill often use this to test how far the Magic Wand can get me before I have to start adding to selections manually.