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You will find the Lasso tool underneath the Marquee tools we have just been discussing. The Lasso tool, the regular Lasso, looks just like well, a lasso. A little cowboy lasso there. So let us click on that and the advantage of using the regular Lasso tool is that we can make free form selections. There is no preset shapes here, we just click and hold down our mouse button, and we can drag at any particular shape or area that we want.

Beautiful, I am going to hit ctrl+D to deselect that. Now you want to make sure here, this the problem that I have seen most people make with the Lasso tool, is that they will draw a line and let go, and be unhappy with the results. Now let me deselect that again.

The problem with that is that selection areas have to be just that. They have to be an area. They cannot just be a line somewhere. So if I draw like a half circle, like a smiley face, or something like that, like a smile, and I let go, it is going to draw a straight line back to the point where I originated the selection area from. So it has to be a container. It cannot just be a straight line, so I am going to deselect that.

So now we can go back to areas like this that have a little bit more of an irregular shape, and just kind of click and drag, and follow the edges, and this is where a graphics tablet really comes in handy. Wacom is probably the best brand out there for making graphics tablets. It is spelled W-A-C-O-M, and basically what you can do with that graphics tablet, is that you have a stylus or a pen that you could draw on a pad, and it is just like using a pen, but your pen is your mouse essentially.

So if you are having a tough time with your mouse going in there, and doing all the selecting that you need to do, you might want to try looking in to getting a graphics tablet, basic ones start under at $100.00. I am just going to deselect this by hitting ctrl+D.

Now as you could see the Lasso tool is a great benefit. It gives us a lot of flexibility and control, but there is also a couple other Lassos, and the same Lasso family that it can also help us when we are making selections. So I am going to close this image by going to the red X. I am going to click that. I am going to select NO, I do not want to save that, and I am going to go to file open again, and back to lesson 3 in our project files. I am going to select Polygonal Stairs. I am going to hit open here,

Now if you ever run across an image like this, which is a series of straight lines. Let us say we wanted to select these stairs. The best tool probably to do that is the Polygonal Lasso underneath the regular Lasso, you will find it here the Polygonal Lasso. Looks kind of like the regular Lasso, except it is just a series of flat edges, instead of a round Lasso.

Now the Polygonal Lasso is still a lasso, but it works in a different manner. So let us click the Polygonal Lasso tool, and let us zoom in on our stairs here, and what we can do is click once and let go, click once and let go, click once and let go, and basically just makes a series of flat edges here. So we can select these stairs with the slightest of ease. So we can go around here, but I remember again that selection areas have to be areas. We cannot just let go, and go start doing something else, because it is going to think that we want to make more of a selection.

So here is a couple of shortcuts when you are dealing with the Polygonal Lasso tool. I can hit the backspace key on the PC, and that is the delete key on the main area of the keyboard on the Mac, and that will back me up one point. So if I do not like a point that I laid down, this area over here looks particularly shady on mine. So I could hit backspace, backspace, backspace, backspace, and just keep going backwards until I get rid of the problem points that I laid down, and I will try to be more careful in the future. I was being a little reckless there.

Another one of the frustrating things about the Polygonal Lasso tool is you might change your mind halfway through and decide “You know what, I want to use a different