Pixels outside of selection getting deleted.

[Umagula]

I fixed it. The problem came from the anti-aliasing being on when I did the selections. Since I kept adding to the selections, it kept anti-aliasing those individual parts. I thought it would only anti-alias at the edge of the final selection, but apparently not. So while the pixels were indeed selected, they were being made translucent because they were at the edge of a particular selection, even though that selection was an addition to a bigger selection. I figured it would be something like that, which is why I posted in the newbies section (a photoshop pro would've probably known better).

I figured out how to get it to fill out the selection by feathering it. That filled out the selection. It anti-aliased the edges a notable amount, but fortunately that wasn't a problem for this particular project.

Thanks for the help! You guys gave me some additional things to look at, and I was able to solve it thanks to that.

[JLBerry]

I would like to see the image and your approach that you used, step for step, because I have serious reasons to believe that there is a much easier and more accurate approach for your problem. Of course, only if you're interested to learn something new.