Selecting / Quick Mask

To start I use the magnetic lasso tool for the intial selection.

After the selection is complete I hit the mask button under the color selectors on the bottom of the tools pallet. This will turn the screen outside of the selection a transparent red. I use The mask mode to clean up the selection, In this mode you can zoom into the selection very close while using your paintbrush tool to add and take away the mask. I tend to use a circle brush with about a 95-97 percent opacity.




Once the selection is cleaned up and perfect you can save the selection using the channels pallet next to the layers pallet.




Do this by cliking the far left icon on the bottom of the pallet, this loads your quick mask as a selection. Then click on the icon just to right of that one to save your selection as a channel. By doing this you can always return to the channels pallet to reload your mask as a selection. Now you can do other things and not worry about having to reselect the object out of the picture!