Removing and Combining Parts of Images

Now that you’ve got these images opened, let’s begin. We’re going to combine these into a single image you’ll use as a web page title bar within your website.

Let’s design for an 800x600 screen resolution (a good standard to use nowadays). As mentioned in first tutorial, this size also ensures that we leave room for the web browser and that users won’t have to scroll to view your web page.

Perform the following steps:

1. 
   
   Select File ▶New from Photoshop’s menu bar. The New dialog box displays.
2. 
   
   Enter the following in the New dialog box:
   • 
     
     Width: 775 pixels
   • Height: 420 pixels
   • Resolution: 72 pixels/inch
   • 
     
     Color Mode: RGB Color/8 bit
   • 
     
     Background: Transparent
3. 
   
   Press OK on the New dialog screen. A new image window displays. That’s good. Keep everything open on your work area(even though it may seem cluttered). You’ll be working with all these images in this chapter.

Using the Marquee Selection Tools

Once you’ve defined a new image window, let’s go back and work with our existing images. Let’s start with the World.jpg image. Click the World.jpg image so that it is the active image in Photoshop. Then, select the Elliptical Marquee tool from the toolbar. You’ll find the Marquee tools at the top left of the toolbar.

The Marquee Tool Options

Directly below the menu bar sits an options bar, as shown in figure below. The options available change depending on the tool that is selected from the toolbar.

The options available for the Marquee tools include:

• 
  
  Tool Presets
• New Selection, Add to Selection, Subtract from Selection, and Intersect with Selection
• Feather
• Anti-alias
• Style
• Width
• Height
  

Let’s take a look at these options, as they’re all useful in isolating areas of an image.

Tool Presets

The tool presets are a way of storing settings for a particular tool. The tool presets appears on the options bar with every tool, as shown in figure below. The tool presets are useful if you need the same set of options repeatedly. If this is the case, you can create a tool preset so you don’t have to set your options every time.

 

Access the Tool Preset option by double-clicking the drop-down arrow to the right of the active tool. If there are no tool presets defined, a message within the drop-down submenu states “No Tool Presets Defined for Current Tool.”

Caution

I prefer to avoid creating tool presets. Once you create a tool preset, the original options for that tool vanish from the options bar. If you do create tool presets, make sure you first create a tool preset without any options. This tool preset will then mimic the options bar’s original state.

In this tutorial:

1. Combining Images
2. Removing and Combining Parts of Images
3. Creating, Adding, Subtracting and Intersecting Selection