Caroline,
The freehand lasso tool is a skill that takes a bit of time to develop. Some people find using a tablet an easier way to work. But there is hope for mouse users. Under the lasso tool (just click and hold on the tool and you’ll see extra tools), are a magnetic lasso tool and a polygonal lasso tool.
The magnetic tool will snap to edges. It can also be tricky, but if there is good contrast between your subject and the background, it does a great job.
The polygonal lasso tool creates a series of staight lines, but if you zoom way in and make your straight lines very short, you can get a very smooth edge, and it is, in my opinion, the easiest to use.
Rich
Caroline,
Try the polygonal lasso. You need to zoom waaay in to get a good selection (ctrl key and the plus sign). Click with mouse, go short distance, click with mouse. Since you are working highly magnified, those short straight lines will form curves at normal viewing size. Move the image around in window by holding the space bar til you see the "Hand" and drag to reposition image in viewing window.
Caroline,
I hate to admit this but I use the selection brush a lot. Did any one mention after making a selection you can go to selection>modify>smooth. I think that’s right…it’s in that menu at any rate. You can select how many pixels to smooth by…it won’t do your work for you but helps. You can also contract or expand your selection from this menu.
Terri
Caroline,
What is the difference between the modify>smooth command vs feather?
Thanks
George,
I believe feather disperses the pixels in a way that causes your selection to fade-out and blend in with the background instead of having a crisp sharp edge where as the smooth command works on a mean. Meaning it would just take the pixels and find the average to take away selection choppiness. This would not in itself blend as feather does. If I am in any way incorrect, I am sure someone will be along shortly to correct this.
Terri
I had never looked into the Select-Modify-Smooth command, before, but decided to look it up after this conversation piqued my curiosity.
Here’s what PSE Help has to say:
**
To clean up stray pixels left inside or outside a color-based selection:
Choose Select > Modify > Smooth.
For Sample Radius, enter a pixel value between 1 and 100, and click OK. Photoshop Elements searches around each selected pixel for unselected pixels within the specified range. For example, if you enter 16 for Sample Radius, Photoshop Elements searches 16 pixels on each side of every selected pixel. If most pixels in that range are selected, any unselected pixels are added to the selection. If most pixels in that range are unselected, any selected pixels are removed from the selection.
**
Does anyone regularly use Smooth? If so, would you mind giving a practical example of how it helps?
Thanks,
Byron
Byron, one example for it’s use is to get rounded corners ( without a feather) on a rectangular marquee selection. The higher the pixel amount you put in the rounder the corners.
