[BrianF]

I'm trying to go through some of the exercises in the Eismann book on retouching, and I'm doing one that involves using Load Selection from another document, to generate an edge mask, I think. Is there a series of steps I can take to get the same result in PSE3?

Hmm. Somehow it looks like the Transparent Grayscale HP tool is the thing here. I just need to find out how to get the selection from one document into another.

[BrianF]

Anybody? It looks like Load Selection selects pixels in your document based on what it sees in another document. I can get the right selection in the other document, but I don't know how to select that same area in my original document.

[Doug Nelson]

I don't have PSE3 installed, but one way to do it would be to make a layer, form your selection, fill the selection on the new layer, then drag or copy and paste the new layer to the other document. Then ctrl-click the new layer's thumbnail to load it as a selection.

I'm sure there are many other ways.

[BrianF]

The problem with that is this. The technique I'm trying to follow is to duplicate the image, convert it to grayscale, blur it, and then do a load selection in the original document with the source being the grayscale copy. That produces a selection in the original document. There are manipulations I can do using one of the Hidden Power tools, acting on the second document, that produce the desired selection there, but if I just drag the layer from the grayscale image to the original, I get the grayscale contents, and that's not what I need.

[Doug Nelson]

If you drag the filled selection, then ctrl-click on it, you should get a selection that matches the original in every way. Then turn off the visibility of the dragged layer and you should have what you were looking for.