All Multimedia Stuff

Marquee

This is most straightforward selection tool, the Marquee allows you to draw a box as well as a circle, column, or row around a section of your image, and select everything in that section. By default, the Rectangular Marquee is the primary tool that is visible in your toolkit, but if you click and hold on the icon, a submenu will appear with the other Marquee tools. To quickly access the Marquee, just press the M key, and to switch to the other Marquee tools, you can press Shift+M.

Quick Selection

The Quick Selection tool is one of the new addition to the Photoshop toolkit, and it allows you to paint a selection just like a brush, with options for brush hardness, size, and more. Just paint around the target area, and Photoshop will identify the edges of your selection. For even more finesse and accuracy, you can enable the "Refine Edge" and "Auto-Enhance" settings on the top options bar.

Magic Wand

Normally, the Magic Wand isn't the right tool for the job, because it measures color and contrast when making your selection. It's good when selecting objects that have an extreme color contrast with the background, but for a more complex selection, you may want to use one of the other tools. Fortunately, Photoshop's developers have included a "Refine Edge" setting on the Magic Wand options bar as well, and this does an excellent job of cleaning up a proper selection.

Color Range

Like the Magic Wand, the Color Range tool lets you target specific colors in an image, and then select them all. To access this tool, go to Select > Color Range and a new dialog box will appear. Then, select the eyedropper icon and click on a color in your image to target it. It shows a preview in the dialog box, and all of the selected areas will be white.

Lasso

This is Similar to the Marquee, the Lasso tool offers a freeform approach to drawing your selection. Once you have completed a lasso shape, Photoshop will analyze the image and adjust your lasso selection so that it matches more cleanly. This is the second fastest way to select, but it often leads to sloppy results. Depending on the situation, you may want to use these other Lasso tools like Polygon Lasso or Magnetic Lasso.

Pen Tool

The Pen tool allows you to create paths, which can then be converted to selections by pressing Command + Click. This is probably the most accurate selection tool since it can draw smooth curves and shapes. With this pen tool, you'll need to get comfortable creating entirely manual paths. Instead of freehand drawing, the main Pen tool uses anchor points and direction lines to determine the selection. At the same, there's also a Freeform Pen tool, which automatically creates anchor points as you draw a path.

How to insert an image into a document

1. Create an InDesign document :

File > New > Document.

2. Create a frame :

Your exact interface will depend on how you've set up the work space but again, since we're talking through beginner processes we'll assume you're using the defaults. In any case, we'll only be using the basic Tools palette, so if you can't see it any point, go to Window, then scroll down and tick Tools.

The cursor will now change into a cross. Click and drag across the document to place the rectangle at the size you want. You can change the dimensions afterwards by clicking on the black arrowhead tool and clicking and dragging one of the corner squares; or just drag around the whole box.

Place the image

Now select the white arrowhead tool, and click the image frame. Now go to File > Place… InDesign now asks you to select the image you want to place. Locate it on your desktop or in the folder where it's stored and click Open. The image will appear in the frame.

Position, resize and crop the image

The image will appear at 100 percent so it might be far too big for the frame. (It also might be too small, in which case you should probably find a new image - blowing it up significantly above 100 percent is likely to compromise the visual quality, so avoid this if the document will be printed or shown off in other ways).

The easiest way to fit the image to the document is by using the Fitting options. Select the black arrowhead tool and click the image in its frame. Now select Object > Fitting and then either Fill Frame Proportionally (which fills the frame with image, but will leave some of the image invisible outside the frame if they're not the same shape) or Fit Content Proportionally (which will fit the entire image inside the frame, but will leave some frame unfilled if they're not the same shape).

Once again, you'll quickly get the hang of using keyboard shortcuts instead. For Fit Content Proportionally, the option we use most often, it's Shift-Alt-Ctrl-E . The same buttons with C instead of E will invoke Fill Frame Proportionally.

For finer control, select the contents of the frame with the black arrowhead (the white arrowhead will select the frame itself) and then move the image around inside the frame with the mouse or the arrow keys for very fine (but slow) control. You can change the scale (effectively the magnification) in the top bar, where you'll see two '100%' numbers on top of each other. One is the vertical scale and the other is horizontal, but by default they're linked, so if you change the top figure to 99% the overall scale will drop to 99 percent and the image will appear smaller on the page.