Efficient and painless use of the selection tools for complex selections

[ofnuts]

A couple of techniques that work with all selection tools, once you know that:

• You can save your current selection (Select/Save to channel)
• Channels can operate on the current selection: bluntly replace it, but also be added, subtracted, intersected with it
• Channels appear in the "Channels" dialog (Windows/Dockable Dialogs/Channels)
  

Then, you have two modes of operation:

The "cumulative":

• Do some selection
• Save selection to channel
• Start new selection part in "addition" mode, with some possible overlap with current selection (shift-click, usually, but for scissors you have to "shift-enter" at the end (instead of plain "enter"))
• Save new selection to channel (keep the old one)
• Etc...
  

With this method you can undo by just restarting with a previous step, and you see your final selection coming, but you cannot easily rework the first selections.

The "stitched pieces":

• Do some selection
• Save selection to channel
• Repeat (with some overlap most of the time)
• Once done, use the Channels dialog to add all the selections to the current selection
  

Slightly more manual at the end, and I recommend to name each selection. But you can redo any selection easily, and have each selection with a different feathering amount

For all methods:

• Since you spent so much time doing these selections, save the final selection, too. May come in handy.
• As long as you save the image with as XCF, your selections saved as channels are saved with it. You can interrupt your work... or at least do periodic and useful saves of the image.
• Nothing says you have to use the same selection tool all along... you can use the best tool for each partial selection.