The Freehand Lasso is the most basic of Photoshop’s selection tools. You use it to outline the object or area you want to select by hand. It requires patience and care and even then it’s difficult to follow outlines with any great accuracy. It can still be useful, though, when used in conjunction with feathering or blurring tools.

Here, we want to lighten the dark tones of the cooking pot but leave the rest of the photo unaltered. The Freehand Lasso has been used to quickly select the outline of the pot. It’s not perfectly accurate, but that’s not going to matter.

Next, we create a Levels adjustment layer. The selection is automatically converted into a mask for that layer. We can now adjust the levels, and only the pot is affected. There’s an obvious problem, though. The edges of the selection really stand out now that we’ve made this change, showing where the selection doesn’t follow the outline of the pot exactly.

The solution is to blur the mask. This blends in the adjusted and unadjusted areas much more subtly. Finding the ideal blur takes a little experimentation and guesswork, but a value of 50 pixels usually gives good results.

You don’t have to use an adjustment layer and a mask to use this technique. You can just make the selection and then use the Select > Modify > Feather command and set a value of 50 pixels, and then apply a levels adjustment directly to the image.