One thing I really love about Photoshop is that it offers many different ways to solve a problem. There is generally no right or wrong way, just another way! And in coming up to speed with Photoshop, one of the key skills you’ll need to develop is creating selections and masks.
As with most other areas of the program, there are many ways to create a selection: ranging from the selection tools themselves (lasso, marquee, quick select, etc), to brushing on a layer mask or quick selection using any of the brush tools (brush, pencil, eraser, stamp, smudge, gradient, dodge, burn, etc) to even alt-clicking on a layer’s or channel’s thumbnail to load it as a selection (opt-click for you Mac users). However, I’m going to set all that aside today, and focus on another way to create complex selections – using paths and the paths panel.