Lasso Tools Tutorial

Lasso tools of photoshop

Introduction to Lasso tools of Photoshop :

Photoshop is a powerful and widely used photo editing software, there are many awesome tools. In a photo editing software selection tools plays a great role, whenever we need to select a specific section of an image, various selection tools are quite handy and if we know where to to chose what tool we can do professional level task and time saving obviously. Other than basic selection tools in Photoshop Lasso tools are quite use full to do complicated task or can be time saving. In this article I will try to elaborate Lasso tools of photoshop and how to use these tools properly.

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Lasso Tool :

Use of standard Lasso tool

This part describes, where and how to use standard Lasso tool of Photoshop.

Photoshop has three different Lasso tools, they are different from each other and used to do various tasks. This tool is a one of the simplest tools, the icon of this tool looks like a lasso it works just like a pencil, you have to draw the selection manually, first of all select the lasso tool from the tool bar then click and drag on the canvas, you can close the selection by dragging it to the point from where you have started it, otherwise the selection will be closed by a simple straight selection from the first point to the last point automatically so basically this is a free form selection tool.

I'll suggest you to use this lasso tool if you are trying to select an object haphazardly or trying to cut an object roughly.

Magnetic Lasso Tool :

Use of Magnetic Lasso Tool

This part describes where and how to use Magnetic Lasso Tool.

The standard Lasso tool and Polygonal lasso tool both have some limitations and the basic limitation is that, you have to do all the work manually but our next tool i.e Photoshop Magnetic tool can help you at this point, this tool can detect edge of an image automatically. If the edge of an image is sharp the tool would detect that easily, for example there is an image of a person standing in front of a dark blue background and the person wearing red shirt. Just you have to move the pointer freely around the edge of that person after first click anywhere near the edge of the image of that person. This Magnetic Lasso tool can actually detect the edge of an image nearby your cursor point, it can automatically incline to the edge like magnet, that is why the tool is called magnetic lasso tool. So basically if the the color difference is clear of the object we are willing to select and the background color, it easy for the magnetic lasso to do it's job.

Using lasso tool is not so hard, you can easily operate. lasso tool tips : you can press space bar and drag to navigate easily when using any lasso tool. Remember we always can modify our selection latter on, we can save the selection on selection menu, we can modify that particular selection by pressing shift + any selection tool of to add selection in the existing selection simply means it can grow selection, similarly by pressing salt + any section tool to subtract selection from existing selection, thus you don't need to worry if you make any mistake making any selection we can save or edit the selection latter.

Polygonal Lasso Tool :

Use of Polygonal Lasso Tool

This part describes where and how to use Polygonal Lasso tool.

But for more accuracy you have to use the other lasso tools in Photoshop and which are Lasso and Polygonal Lasso tool. Polygonal Lasso tool is used to draw polygonal shape selection, you can create unlimited number of sides of that polygon, after selecting the tool click on the canvas and release, but you'll see that a straight line sticking to the initial point you can freely move the line. by clicking at another place you are actually creating another point, similarly you can create several points, you have to click twice to close the selection. I'll suggest you to use the selection tool if you want to select a polygonal shape object in an image, for example if you want to cut/copy a table from an image of a house, you can easily select the table by polygonal lasso tool and use ctrl+x or ctrl+c to cut or copy.

This tool is also widely used to select anything which can't be selected automatically with other tool such as magic wand tool. For example let's assume we have a picture of a dog in a dark room and we want make a selection of the dog and add a custom background behind the dog, if background would be white or light color we could one click select the background by magic wand tool or by readjusting tolerance but in our case we have a dog in a dark room so we can't use either magic wand tool or magnetic lasso tool, hence we can use polygon lasso to manually select dog. There are also other good option to do it for example making a vector shape and then converting it to selection but that would be time consuming. To do the selection of the dog by polygon lasso tool you need bit practice though otherwise it may look artificial, anyway best option is zoom the picture, make it larger than painting size (zoom not image size) and start to select the object make sure you are making small distance points in critical places and long distance points in straight places you navigate the screen even during selection by holding space key and mouse drag.

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