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Adobe Photoshop 6 Tutorials

Starting to Work / Magnetic Lasso

Subtitles of the Movie

There are a couple (of) other types of lasso tools you can choose from. Press and hold on the lasso tool icon and it pops up some of the other options. One of them is the polygonal lasso tool and what it does is it creates straight-line section. So I can click with my mouse and it will create this little rubber-band effect. And then click again and it starts sticking the corners down where ever you click. Of course, this isn't that helpful when you have a shape like an apple, which really doesn't have very many straight line segments. But you get the idea. When you pass over the first point, you can see my lasso tools pops up with a small circle next to the lasso tool icon. That means if I click now, it is going to close this selection. Photoshop has created a really great new type of lasso tool called the magnetic lasso tool. And this can really speed up making selections. Particularly helpful for people that don't have precision of a stylus. Look at these options available to you up here. There are three new options we should talk about - one is the width, and right now that width is set for 10 pixels. And what that means is that for 10 pixels around the tip of this lasso tool, it will look for a contrasty edge to attach the selection to. The edge contrast value is a percentage from 1 to 100, and it looks for the contrasty edges - the higher the value the higher the contrasty edge. Frequency tells the magnetic lasso tool about how many points to put down to snap to the edge. The higher the number, the faster your selection will be more accurate. So I am going to put in about 70 here. And of course we also have the feather value, which I am going to leave at 0, because I want a very sharp selection. So with that in mind, I am just going to click just once with my magnetic lasso tool. And I am not clicking but I am dragging near the edge, and you can see when I go away, it actually snaps to edge of my contrasty apple. We will see how it does down in the shadow area, because it begins to lose contrast and you can see it is snapping to the edge of shadow. So I am going to have to come back and clean that up a bit. And if I go inside the apple a bit the magnetic lasso tool snaps my selection back to the edge. So (a) very clever tool. So I am not even pressing down with my mouse, and it is adding lines where the selection will be. And when I pass back over my first point, I get the little circle next to my magnetic lasso tool, which means when I click again, it will close that selection. So now we only have to edit this one portion down here. So I am going to go to my zoom tool, zoom in once so it is little bit easier to see. And switch back to my regular lasso tool, and I'll hold down the Option key or the Alt key in Windows. And you can see it is giving me at the lasso tool with the minus. This way I can take away that extra bit of selection. So let's say it did a pretty good job.

Tutorial Information

Course: Adobe Photoshop 6
Author: Andrew J. Hathaway
SKU: 33189
ISBN: 1930519206
Release Date: 2001-01-01
Duration: 13 hrs / 129 lessons
Captions: For Online University members only
Compatibility: Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux
QuickTime 7, Flash 8

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