Adobe Photoshop CC Polygonal Lasso Tool

Adobe Photoshop CC Polygonal Lasso Tool is a very strange bird to use. It is a very helpful tool, but if you run into a basic problem with the tool you will pull all of your hair out for sure.

The Adobe Photoshop CC Polygonal Lasso Tool is great for selecting objects that have flat surfaces. Buildings, chairs, appliances, houses, stuff like that.

The image below is a perfect candidate for this tool. If you want to take this house and put it on a beach, in a corn field, on a river front, where ever you think would be good. You can select this house with 5 or 6 clicks, invert your selection and you are ready to go.

Below you will see the image ready to drag and drop with no background into any area you desire. I left a white background because I didn’t want to make this a Png 24. Keeping the white background, I can made it a jpg, reducing file size for this web page thus faster download time.

Though the Adobe Photoshop CC Polygonal Lasso Tool was made for selecting flat surfaces, I find that many times I use it to select very complex shapes. As I have said before, much of my business is creating book covers for Amazon, romance writers. Many times I buy 10 images with pictures with people in them and I have to select the people from each image and merge them into one image and make the final image look real.

Below I have and image of two couples and a background. This image is actually 4 images combined. The background, the person on the left, the person on the right and then the couple in the middle.

To “grab” the people, I used the polygonal lasso tool, and slowly clicked, clicked, clicked all the away around each of the images.

If the people had had very clean, single colored backgrounds, then I would have used the magic want tool and one click would have done the job. But with these image that was not the case.

Many times I will use the best selection tool, “Quick Mask,” but we are not there yet in this series of videos.