![]() With the inverse selected, I simply desaturated the background until the colours were not so dominant, and attention was subtly kept on his face. The keyboard shortcut for Select>Inverse is Shift+Control+I on a PC (Mac: Shift+Cmd+I). This is done by using Select>Inverse, which changes my selection to ALL areas OUTSIDE of my original selection on the same layer. But I did not want to brighten his face anymore, I wanted to reduce the colour of the background. On my layout I used the Rectangular Lasso Tool many times.įirstly, I edited my photo, drawing a close cropped square around Callan’s face where I wanted the focus kept. Let’s have a look at these various uses in practice: This is the tool I use on most layouts as it allows me to make rectangular (square if I hold down Shift whilst selecting) selections merely by dragging out a box. This tutorial takes a closer look at the Rectangular Marquee Tool (and it’s counterpart the Elliptical Marquee Tool). Under each of these buttons are grouped tools with similar uses. My screenshot shows the Move Tool, the Rectangular Marquee Tool, the Lasso Tool and the Magic Wand Tool. In PSE they are found under the heading ‘Select’ on the left hand side menu. Let’s start by looking at where the Selection Tools are found. Once you've zoomed in, hold down your spacebar by itself to temporarily switch to the Hand Tool, then click and drag the image along the selection outline to look for problems.In this tutorial we are going to look at the Marquee tool to discover what it does and when to use it. To zoom in, press and hold Ctrl+spacebar (Win) / Command+spacebar (Mac) to temporarily switch to Photoshop's Zoom Tool, then click inside the document window once or twice to zoom in (to zoom back out later, press and hold Alt+spacebar (Win) / Option-spacebar (Mac) and click inside the document window). To inspect the selection outline for any problem areas, it usually helps to be zoomed in on the image. Not to worry though, since we can easily go back and fix up the problem areas, which we'll do next! Adding To The Initial Selection Since the Lasso Tool is essentially a manual selection tool that relies heavily on your own drawing skills, as well as on the accuracy and performance of your mouse, you'll probably end up with an initial selection outline that falls well short of perfect, as mine did. ![]() The initial selection is complete, but there's quite a few problem areas that need fixing. With the Lasso Tool selected, your mouse cursor will appear as a small lasso icon, and you simply click at the spot in the document where you want to begin the selection, then continue holding your mouse button down and drag to draw a freeform selection outline: Of all the selection tools in Photoshop, the Lasso Tool is probably the easiest to use and understand because you simply drag a freehand selection around the object or area you want to select, in a similar way to how you would outline something on a piece of paper with a pen or pencil. We covered how to change the option in the Preferences for switching between tools in the Elliptical Marquee Tool tutorial. It's the tool that looks like the sort of lasso you'd find a cowboy swinging at a rodeo:Įach of the three types of lasso tool gives us a different way to draw selections.Īll three lasso tools share the letter L as their keyboard shortcut for selecting them, so depending on how you have things set up in Photoshop's Preferences, you can cycle through the three tools either by pressing the letter L repeatedly or by pressing Shift+L. The one we'll be looking at in this tutorial is the standard Lasso Tool, which you can access by clicking on its icon in the Tools panel. Photoshop actually gives us three variations of lasso to work with. This tutorial is from our How to make selections in Photoshop series.ĭownload this tutorial as a print-ready PDF! But if you have a good quality mouse (or even better, a pen tablet), decent drawing skills and a little patience, you may find that the Lasso Tool, another of Photoshop's basic selection tools, is all you need. If you're a more advanced Photoshop user, you'll probably head straight for the Pen Tool, the tool of choice for making professional quality form-based selections. But what if we need to select something in a photo that's a little more complex, like someone's eyes, an item of clothing, or maybe a car or a bottle? Something that still has a clearly defined form to it but is beyond the capabilities of Photoshop's geometry-based Marquee Tools. So far in our journey through Photoshop's various selection tools, we've looked at how the Rectangular Marquee Tool allows us to easily draw selections based on simple rectangular or square shapes, and how the Elliptical Marquee Tool extends our selection making abilities into the exciting world of ovals and circles.
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