Photoshop Lasso Tool

Let’s see the details of the lasso tool, with its different variants and utilities to make selections in Photoshop.

The lasso tool is one of those that is used a lot in Photoshop, it is even within reach and useful for inexperienced users. Therefore, there is no doubt that it will be worth knowing and integrating it into our day-to-day tools at work with the photo retouching program. Perhaps with time and the mastery of other techniques and tools it may remain in the background, but from the outset it will be very useful.

The lasso tool is among the main tools in Photoshop and has several variants, such as the polygonal lasso or the magnetic lasso. All of them are classified in the same place on the Photoshop button panel, as can be seen in this image:

We can select any of these tools by clicking with a long press for one second on the Lasso icon. All the different lasso tools are used to make , with the most varied range of results.

Lasso Tool

The most basic Lasso tool, which to differentiate it we can call Freehand Lasso, is used to make a selection with any movement of the mouse. To start it, we activate it from the Photoshop button panel and then click anywhere on the image. With the button pressed we outline the area of ​​the image that we want to select and we release the button when we have finished drawing the selection.

The freehand lasso is very easy to use and, above all, very fast, but the results are often imprecise, not because of the tool itself, but because freehand drawing with the mouse allows little precision, since it is easy to make mistakes and move the mouse outside the bounds we wanted to select. However, for certain jobs it is good to know it because it gives us speed.

Polygonal Lasso Tool

As a variant of the Lasso tool, we have the polygonal selections tool. Working with her is very simple. We have to click on the image at the vertex points of any polygon that we want to select. With this we will obtain a selection made up of straight lines between the marked points, which form a polygon.

For more information and explanations consult the article on the .

Although the polygonal lasso tool allows you to make selections of polygons (whose sides are straight), the more points we put on the polygon, the more defined the silhouette will be. Without a doubt, of the lasso tools, it is the one that seems most versatile and useful to us.

Magnetic Lasso Tool

As a third option for lasso tools we have the Magnetic Lasso. It is used to make selections on silhouettes that automatically adjust to the image on which we are selecting. The magnetic loop means that, as we make the selection, a possible route for the selected area is proposed to us. This proposed route has the particularity of adapting to the shape of the image below the place where we are making the selection, so it is especially helpful when making selections of silhouettes of elements in the image.

To use this tool, we click the mouse to start the selection and then it is simply a question of surrounding the element to be selected with the mouse pointer, without doing anything else. The selection will be made automatically, which will adapt to the silhouette of the element that we want to select and anchor points will be placed to form the area. If we want to manually mark an anchor point, we simply click on the image.

The magnetic lasso is a nice aid for making complex silhouette selections, but the selection won’t always turn out perfectly, because sometimes Photoshop can interpret the image background incorrectly, which can result in the selection not fitting exactly to the desired silhouette. However, it is a quick option that helps a lot in certain cases and has special options that can help Photoshop to better find the path that we want for the selection, as we will see next.

Lasso Tool Options

All variants of Photoshop’s lasso tool have some special options for modifying your selection drawing preferences. There are some common options and the magnetic lasso tool has some additional options as well.

The options that all lasso tools have in common are shown in this image:

You should look at the feather value, which allows you to set a value to make the selection have a feathering at the edges. The anti-aliasing selection box allows the border lines of the selection not to be fully digital, with abrupt changes, but instead causes the edges to be smoothed, also known as anti-aliasing. Learn more about these pick options in the article.

The magnetic lasso tool also has other options that can help us to better adapt the magnetic behavior of the tool to the image where we are making the selection. In the following image we can see these options:

Among these possible values ​​we have the width, which is the radius around the mouse that Photoshop will try to magnetize the border to. The border contrast, which is used to define the contrast that must exist between the silhouette and the background of the image, so that the border adjusts to the silhouette. Finally, the ruling, which allows you to configure the placement distance between magnetic points.