One of Elements’ most impressive talents is its ability to let you select part of your image and make changes only to that area. Selecting something tells Elements, “Hey, this is what I want to work on—don’t touch the rest of it.”

You can select a whole image or any part of it. Using selections, you can fine-tune images in very sophisticated ways: change the color of just one rose in a bouquet, for instance, or change your nephew’s festive purple hair back to something his grandparents would appreciate. Graphics pros will tell you that good selections make the difference between shoddy, amateurish work and a slick professional job.

Elements offers you a whole bunch of different selection tools to work with. You can draw a rectangular or circular selection with the Marquee tools; paint a selection on your photo with the Selection brush; or just draw a line with the Quick Selection tool and let Elements figure out the exact boundaries of your selection. When you’re looking to pluck a particular object (a beautiful flower, say) from a photo, the Magic Extractor works wonders. And Transform Selection lets you resize your selections in a snap.