About selections

Selections are a great help when you want to work in a specific area, while not altering any of the area around it. In many regards, a selection is a lot like a stencil. You basically are enabling yourself to paint only in one area while the rest of your canvas is left unaffected.

With Pixelmator's powerful, pixel-accurate collection of selection tools, you can quickly and easily select any part of your images and edit that part by applying color adjustments, special effects, or the fill, stroke, transform, move, delete, duplicate, or copy and paste features to the selected part as a new layer to other images.

Every selection tool has its own method for selecting pixels. For instance, the Rectangular Marquee tool is ideal for selecting squares or rectangular shapes, whereas the Elliptical Marquee tool helps with selecting circles and ovals.

Pixelmator Selection tools

Selection tool

Description

Rectangular Marquee Best for selecting squares and rectangles.
Elliptical Marquee Best for selecting circles and ellipses.
Row Marquee For selecting a single line across the canvas horizontally.
Column Marquee For selecting a single line across the canvas vertically.
Lasso Tool To select irregularly shaped objects.
Polygon Lasso To select irregularly shaped, straight-edged objects.
Magic Wand To select similarly colored areas.
Paint Selection Tool Paint to select areas with an adjustable brush tip.

You can also use commands in the Edit menu to select all pixels, to deselect, reselect, or invert a selection, to cut or copy, to select a range of colors within an entire image, or even to load selections from layers. For easier and more precise selecting, a Quick Mask editing mode is available in Pixelmator that allows you to temporarily show your selection as a colored overlay and use any of the painting tools or filters to modify it. The Refine Selection option helps you to enhance your selections by modifying their smoothness, feathered aspects and size.

Each Selection tool, except for Select Color, has its selection mode available on the Tool Options bar:

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A New Creates a new selection
B Add To Adds a new selection to an existing selection
C Subtract Subtracts from an existing selection
D Intersect Subtracts the overlap of two selections

When selecting rounded areas, you are able to choose whether to keep soft edges, or jagged but precise edges.

1. Choose a selection tool. 2. In the Tool Options Bar, click on the Action pop-up menu to choose Smooth Edges. For jagged but precise edges, turn off the Smooth Edges option.
  1. Choose a selection tool.
  2. In the Tool Options Bar, click on the Action pop-up menu to choose Smooth Edges. For jagged but precise edges, turn off the Smooth Edges option.

SEE ALSO

Make selections

Enhance selections

Edit selection in Quick Mask mode