Limey, I don't follow you: both methods Stroker gave you do save selections that you can recover!!!
As Stroker said, the channels palette works well for this job!
You can save the various selection as alpha channels.
They are saved with the picture. You can get the marching ants of each selection area by control+clicking on the alpha channel icon, or using the shortcut given by Stroker...
His second solutioin works also for the recoloring : create selection, then go to layer>new adjustment layer>hue and saturation... then make your adjustments...
You can adjust, then save a copy of the image with each change...
to recover the marching ants (altough it is not necessary, given the fact that you just need to change the settings of the adjustment layer-to do so double click on the adjustment layer icon in the layer palette-), click on the mask of the adjustment layer.
Yet another method: first select the parts that you want to edit... then CTRL+J they are now copied to a new layer. To see the marching ants (*), CTRL+click the layer icon in the layer palette.
(*)it is not really needed to see the Marching Ants, since the mask restricts the changes from the rest of the image
there is also a lot of info in the user guide about adjusment layers, channels, etc!
