>>>ALAN: So after we talk about the marquee tool, it's time for us to now learn the lasso tools.
Now the lasso tools have three iterations and we're going to
cover all three of those in our exercises today. Download the files from
canvas for this tutorial and then open them up in Photoshop. The lasso tools are
a great addition to our selection arsenal. Coming off of the marquee tool,
the lasso tools are really going to open us up and free us up to make more
complex selections. So let's get started.
The lasso tool is the tool right underneath your marquee tool, that looks kind of like a dental floss lasso.
If you click and hold that tool, we see the three lasso tools at our disposal.
The regular lasso tool, the polygonal, or polygonal lasso tool, and the magnetic lasso tool.
Let's start with the regular lasso tool. Now let's say a client has
hired you guys to utilize their logo across multiple different designs - maybe
one is a business card, one's a website, and one is a digital flyer. And they give
you this graphic and you ask them, "Well, do you have this logo cut out?" And they
say, "Oh this is all we have." Which is a very common response, by the way, for
smaller mom-and-pop stores. They don't have a graphic designer on hand, so they just
kinda give you whatever they have. It's up to you now to cut this logo out - good
enough to use for your different designs. So let's start with our regular lasso tool.
Fair warning, the regular lasso tool - it's a freehand selection tool. Which
means, if you don't have a steady hand on your mouse, your selection's gonna look terrible.
Now let's go ahead and zoom in here to make this badge icon fill our screens.
Now the lasso tool works with a 'click and hold' method. Choose a point,
click and hold your mouse down, and then begin to drag your mouse across your
desk to make this selection line. I'm using a trackball Mouse myself, and you
can see this is just not gonna cut it. No pun intended.
To finish a selection with the lasso tool, you have to make sure that
you come back up to your very first starting point. And then release your mouse.
Now that cut out would not work. It would be absolutely ridiculous to cut
that out and think that that would be usable. So then what is our regular lasso
tool for if it's that miserable of an experience? Well for those of you that
might be using a Wacom tablet and stylus at home, where you kind of have like a
digital pencil that you're working with, this tool becomes much more accurate.
In fact, it kind of becomes a digital exacto knife that you can use to cut out - as
accurately as your hand will allow. For those of us with laser mice or trackball
mice at home, this tool is pretty much unusable. So now that we've had a good laugh,
let's just go ahead and 'deselect.' 'Select,' 'deselect.' Now you'll notice that I've
named this file the 'polygonal lasso tool' for a reason. Let's click and hold our
lasso tool and let's come down to the next tool now - the polygonal (or some
people call it the polygonal) lasso tool. Now the polygonal lasso tool works in a
series of clicks. We no longer have to click and hold like the lasso tool.
If I click, just once, starting on this corner to the left.. and now I move my
mouse.. you can see I've tethered that corner. Come up to the top corner here
and click again. Next corner, click again. And so on and so forth. Back to our
original starting point. We can see this tiny little circle appear. That little
circle is an indicator that you found your first point. It will not make a
selection unless you see that icon and then click. Now that is a pretty good selection -
much better than the regular lasso tool. So now we're ready to
completely isolate this badge from its background. Hit 'delete.'
Uh-oh. That's not what we wanted to do. Remember that when we hit delete on the
keyboard, it's deleting anything inside of our selection. In this case, we wanted to
erase everything outside of our selection. I'm gonna go ahead and hit
CTRL-Z to bring it back. If we want to get rid of everything outside of this
badge, we have to invert our selection. Let's go up again to select, and let's
choose 'inverse.' And just like the previous tutorial, that's gonna select
everything but the 'A' badge. Go ahead and hit 'delete.' Ah much better.
Now we have an isolated badge ready to go for any design that we're working for
for this company. But wait.. the company comes back to you and says, "Oh sorry, we
didn't explain this well enough.. we actually want the "A" cut out as well. The
"A" should be transparent just like the background."
Well, not to worry we can fix that, but let's CTRL-Z - let's bring back our
background. I'm gonna show you guys how we can do all this in one fell swoop.
Hit CTRL-Z one more time to un-invert our selection. You shouldn't see
any dancing, dotted lines around the edges of your artboard - just around the badge.
I want to now select the 'A,' but keep the selection for our badge.
This takes us back up to our option bar, where once again we see our post-it note icons
just like with the marquee tool. Now if I want to get rid of the 'A,' I want to
subtract from my selection. So I'm going to click the third post-it note icon.
With my polygonal lasso tool now, I can begin to click each point of the 'A'
back to my first point. And now I have removed the 'A' from my selection. So if I
hit 'delete' now, notice it deletes everything but the 'A.' Once we invert that, the 'A'
would be deleted. But wait, the center part of the 'A' needs to remain. It needs
to remain. So we actually need to put this back. This means we have to add to
our selection. Let's now click the second post-it note icon. And now let's trace out
the inside triangle. So now we have the badge with the 'A' removed from it, with
the inner triangle put back. Now let's inverse our selection. And now hit delete
on your keyboard and voila - with one keystroke we have now removed everything
needed from this logo. Let's go back up to 'select' and let's 'deselect.'
These post-it note icons can kind of be a mental game sometimes - trying to understand
whether you need to add or subtract from your selection can be one of the hardest
things about these early selection tools. So practice this, and whatever you do
don't try to add or subtract a selection after you've inversed a selection.
Because now your add and subtract are also inversed. You'll think you're adding
to something, but you're actually subtracting from it. So always try to
work with your post-it note icons in a regular selection mode, and then inverse last.