Photoshop CC: The Missing Manual, 2nd Edition

Selecting Irregular Areas

As you might imagine, areas that aren’t uniform in shape or color can be a real bear to select. Luckily, Photoshop has a few tools in its arsenal to help you get the job done. In this section, you’ll learn about the three lassos and the Pen tool, as well as a few ways to use these tools together to select hard-to-grab spots.

The Lasso Tools

The lasso toolset contains three freeform tools that let you draw an outline around the area you want to select. If you’ve got an amazingly steady mouse hand or if you use a digital drawing tablet (see the box on The Joy of Painter), you may fall in love with the plain ol’ Lasso tool. If you’re trying to select an object with a lot of straight edges, the Polygonal Lasso tool will do you proud. And the Magnetic Lasso tries to create a selection for you by examining the color of the pixels your cursor is over. This section explains all three tools, which share a slot near the top of the Tools panel (see Figure 4-14).

Figure 4-14. So many lassos, so little time! The regular Lasso tool is great for drawing a selection freehand, the Polygonal Lasso is good for drawing selections around shapes that have a lot of straight lines, and the Magnetic Lasso is like an automatic version of the regular Lasso—it tries to create the selection for you.

Lasso Tool

The regular Lasso tool lets you draw a selection completely freeform as if you ...