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 [...]
Tag Archive for 'Selections'
This is an area of a photo marked out for editing and indicated by an outline of ‘marching ants’ (a flashing dotted line). Whatever adjustments you make now will only apply to the area that’s been selected (until you cancel [...]
This creates a rectangular or square selection in Photoshop and may sometimes be used for more advanced techniques, such as custom picture frame designs, say. It’s not really of much use photographically because you won’t often want to select a perfectly [...]
A mode in Photoshop where a selection you’ve created is converted into a ‘mask’ which you can edit with the paint tools and then convert back to a selection.
A quick and accurate selection tool in Photoshop and one of the most useful. You make up selections click by click, out of straight lines. Each time you click in the image, another selection ‘node’ and straight-line segment is added. In [...]
Masks protect or hide certain areas of the photo in Photoshop and other image-editing programs, and are related to selections. Indeed, masks are sometimes interchangeable with selections and may be saved permanently as part of the image, for example layer masks [...]
Photoshop’s Magnetic Lasso tool attempts to follow object outlines, automatically detecting and following sharp edges, though it’s not always successful. It can help you trace complicated outlines quickly, but it can also prove maddeningly ‘random’, flying off in different directions without [...]
The Magic Wand tool in Photoshop selects areas of similar tone. Using a low tolerance value selects near-identical tones, while a high value selects a wider range.
A Photoshop tool which combines the functions of the Magic Wand and the Eraser to quickly delete large areas of an image. You click on the area you want to delete, and all pixels of a similar tone to the point [...]
Photoshop’s Lasso tool comes in three different types, which share the same flyout on the Tools palette. The simplest is the Freehand Lasso, where you simply drag a freehand outline around the are you want to select. The ‘Polygonal’ lasso lets [...]
‘Feathering’ is where you soften the edges of selections so that you don’t get a hard division between the adjusted part of the image and the rest.
This makes circular or oval selections in Photoshop. Drag to create elliptical selections or hold down the Shift key as you drag to create circular ones.
This command cancels any selections you’ve made when editing a photo. It’s good practice to cancel selections as soon as you’ve finished with them to avoid confusion. When you select part of an image the selection remains active until you make [...]
Photoshop tool for selecting areas of similar colour. You can adjust the tolerance, or ‘Fuzziness’ of the selection, and it’s previewed in the Color Range dialog as you work.