As you become more proficient with your photo-editor, eventually you will want to enhance only a small area of the photograph rather than the entire image.

Most editors provide tools which allow you to isolate a portion of the image, then make editing changes to only that area. These tools are generally referred to as Selection Tools. When a selection area is active, all edit functions affect only that area.

While the principles of 'selecting' are universal in photo editing, the number and type of selection tools you have depend on the brand of editor you use and it's version.

Adobe Photoshop Elements 3.0, the editor we use for demonstrations in this guide, offers a comprehensive suite of Selection Tools. The suite is so extensive, in fact, that it would be a mistake for us to delve too deeply into this one editors selection methods.

Therefore, we limit this lesson on Selecting to fundamentals. We show you how selections are made, and how selected areas can be manipulated to improve our pictures. We leave it to you to explore the full capabilities of your editor's selecting capabilities