This lesson is exclusive to members

Adobe Photoshop CC - Essentials Training

How to select things with straight edges in Adobe Photoshop CC

Daniel Walter Scott

Download Exercise Files

Contents

Certificates

We’re awarding certificates for this course!

Check out the How to earn your certificate video for instructions on how to earn yours and click the available certificate levels below for more information.

You need to be a member to view comments.

Join today. Cancel any time.

Sign Up

Hey there, in this tutorial we're going to look at the Lasso Tool. It's super quick for doing little selections like this, with things that have straight edges, or this little icon here. I just need to quickly grab a little chunk of it. You can see the selection is not perfect, that's the quick and dirty Selection Tool that you really need for your tool kit. I use it often enough that I feel like I should share it with you guys as well. Let's jump in there and learn how to use it. 
Let's get started by going to 'File', 'Open'. We're on '05 Selection' still, 'Lasso 01', and click 'Open'. I wanted to show you a graphic, like we end up in Photoshop a lot with images, but I use it for a lot of Web design, UI App design, Infographics, that type of thing as well, so I'm using this graphic here because it kind of best demonstrates using these Lasso tools. So the Lasso Tool is this third one down here in my Tool Bar. If you click, hold it down, and we're going to use these top two, the last one here, the Magnetic Lasso Tool. I would jump straight to the Quick Selection Tool rather than this one. Some people like it. 
With the Quick Selection, we've learnt lots, and it's better in my opinion. So the Lasso Tool is, it's like a Lasso, it's making a selection, right? So we're going to go click, hold, and drag. Let's say we want to grab this icon for whatever reason. We want to copy it to another document, or just move it around in this document, because at the moment all of these things are fused to the background. So I'm going to click, hold, and drag my mouse, and I'm being pretty rough. Really rough, and just get all the way back to roughly the beginning and then let go of your mouse, and it's made a selection. 
I can go to 'Edit', 'Copy', 'Edit', 'Paste'. And now my Move Tool, you'll see, has been pasted on his own layer. It's just handy for like moving things around. It's not an absolutely perfect mask, as you can see, it's really rough but there are lots of times where I just need to quickly move something around. I'm not going to spend the time using the Quick Selection Tool and select a Mask, I just want to do a hatchet job. It would be wrong for me to move through the selections part of this course without showing you how to do the hatchet jobs. 
Let's look at the other tool that I use reasonably often, the Polygonal Lasso Tool or Polygonal, or wherever it's called. Click and hold down the 'Lasso Tool', grab the second option. Now we'll use this in a little bit more preciseness. Let's zoom in. I'm making up words today. Let's say I want this part, and go to a different document. Now what happens with this is, you click once and then let go of your mouse, and it's kind of attached. I'm not holding anything down now, I'm not dragging, or anything you can just click again, click again. Then we go back to the beginning, can you see, the icon changes from the kind of normal little thing to the one that has a little 0 there, little O. 
Say I'm going to close you up. So that's what we're going to do. Let's go to 'Select', 'Deselect'. I'm going to start here, click once, click once again, click once again, click once again. You can see, it's just a handy way of-- instead of trying to use the Quick Selection Tool, when you know it's just some rough shapes. That's a -- missed a little bit at the top but you get the idea, right? Now I can go copy, and at the moment I'm on the wrong layers for copy. It's doing some weird stuff, so make sure you're on your 'Background Layer', hit 'Copy'. 'Edit', 'Copy', 'Edit', 'Paste'. Now your Move Tool, and I've got this thing now that's been nicely cut out that I could copy and paste to a new document. And this is less of a hatchet job, it's a perfectly sharp edge so why wouldn't I use the Lasso Tool to make it a perfectly sharp selection? 
If this felt like a really kind of quick tutorial I guess I only use it for quick things. If it's not going to be a quick job using these two tools, you're probably going to move to something like a Quick Selection Tool, and be adding and removing, and then tidying up with the Selective Mask, but if it's speed you need, the Lasso Tool could be perfect for you. Let's tuck that way in the back of your tool kit and move on to the next video.