How To Remove A Selection In GIMP

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How do I make this selection go away? Once you’ve selected something in GIMP, it’s not super obvious how you unselect so you can do on editing everywhere on your canvas.

So how do you make a selection go away in GIMP? Simple. It only takes one little step.

Remove a Selection In GIMP

To get rid of the current selection without saving it first:

• Go to Select > None in the Main Menu. The selection will be removed.
• Alternatively, you can use the keyboard shortcut Shift Ctrl A on a Mac, or Shift Cmd A in Windows.

If you want to save the selection before you get rid of it, you can save it as a Path which you can turn back into a selection later.

• To do that, first go to Select > To Path.
• You can check that your selection was saved as a path by going to Windows > Dockable Dialogs > Paths in the Main Menu to open the Paths Dialog. You can dock this dialog to the Toolbox if you want to keep your saved paths handy.
• Then go to Select > None to remove the active selection from the image.
• Now, if you want to re-activate the selection, go to the Paths Dialog, highlight the correct path, then go to Select > From Path in the Main Menu. The path will be turned into a selection.

Conclusion

See? Making a selection go away in GIMP isn’t super obvious, but it’s not exactly hard either.