To be a good digital designer, you must have a good knowledge in using various photoshop tools. Some of the tools can reduce your time in creating your masterpiece than doing it manually.  Hate to say it but even I hardly use everything in photoshop. All I know is my trusty pen tools. Talking about pen tools, here I list some of the photoshop tools that can help you to make perfect selection.

Pen tools

Pen Tools

My favorite tools out of everything in photoshop and illustrator. Pretty useful in digital drawing and can achieve great result if you mastered it. Beginners might not know that this tool can also be use to make a selection in photoshop. Creating a selection using pen tool is one of the most accurate way.

First open path window and create new path. Use the pen tool to draw your path. You can draw a straight path from the point you plotted. To make curve selection, just click and drag it. After finish drawing your selection, right click the path and choose make selection. Zoom in your canvas to make a better selection, the more you zoom in, more accurate it will get.

Magic wand

magic wand

Magic wand is the most popular tool for beginners. It’s also the easiest way to make a selection in photoshop. Just choose what you want to select and click it with magic want. It will automatically make the selection for you. Actually, I hate magic wand. Why? When you make a selection on a real picture, the selection will become bad. Even if the selection is almost like what you want it, the selection will not be smooth. I only use it if I’m really lazy.

Lasso tools

lasso tools

There are 3 lasso tools that are freehand lasso, polygonal lasso and magnetic lasso. The freehand lasso and polygonal lasso can be categorized as one because when you use either one, you can always change it while holding alt key. This helps you make selection easily.

The magnetic lasso is different than others two. It is a great way of making selections around complicated shapes. It will automatically detect the edges around the shape and place anchor along the edge. Increase the frequency value if you want to select a really complicated shape. By doing so, the anchors are placed closely together.

If you use one of the three lasso tools to make a selection and don’t like the way it’s going, just press esc on your keyboard to it and start all over again.

You should remember when you start making a selection using lasso tools, in order to close your selection, click back on the point you started from.

Marquee tools

marquee tools

Is not only to make a single selection using the predefined shape, you can also combine multiple selections in many different ways. You can add shapes, subtract shapes or intersect shapes. You can do this by choosing the options on the top toolbar.

These are all the selection tools I know. Hope this post will help you a bit to make a better selection in photoshop. Or maybe if you know more than me, lead me to make  better selections.

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