From the course: Drawing and Painting in Photoshop

Rectangular Marquee tool - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Drawing and Painting in Photoshop

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Rectangular Marquee tool

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- [Narrator] So far, we have accepted that our color application always affects the whole canvas. And that's okay for a tool like the brush tool that gives us a lot of control over where the color is applied. But what about for example, the gradient tool? What if we want to control which area of our digital canvas is filled with the gradient? Enter the rectangular marquee tool. We find it up here in the toolbar. For this tool, we can define our rectangular area by simply clicking and dragging on our digital canvas. When we release, a selection is created and any color application can now only happen inside this selection. So if we now use our gradient tool, our gradient is only applied inside the selection. The default behavior of the rectangular marquee tool is that when you create a new selection, it replaces the old one. However, in the options bar, we find a couple of buttons that change this behavior. For example, here we have the "add to selection" option and if we click it, now every new selection will be added to the existing selection. That way, we can build up and refine the shape of our selected area. There is also a "subtract from selection" option. And with that, we can subtract the new selections from the existing one. And then there is the "intersect with selection" option. And if we now draw a new selection, only the area that is both in the old selection and the new selection will end up to be our final combined selection. If we click and hold the rectangular marquee tool icon in the toolbar, we reveal another selection tool which is the "elliptical marquee tool". It works just like the rectangular marquee tool, but it creates elliptical selections. You can also use the different selection options and combine different selections to a final composite selection. Please note that you can use the elliptical marquee tool in combination with the rectangular marquee tool. And that way, you can have a combination of elliptical and rectangular selections. And you can end up with some pretty complex selections that way. By using the two marquee tools, we get a lot of control over the area in which our colors applied, and for some artistic styles, having this precise control is very useful.

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