Selection Tools

There are many different selection tools within Photoshop, and they can be used for different things, in this post I will be explaining and showcasing what the different tools do and how they differ from one another. 

Rectangular Marquee Tool

As you can see above that is the rectangular marquee tool, it creates a rectangular shape where you click and drag, the rectangular shape is nick named 'marching ants'. To get the shape closer to the image you wish to move around or manipulate, in this case the tower, then you can use the 'subtract from' tool which is located at the top of the page in Photoshop  shown in the screen shot below. 

When this tool has been selected you can just click and drag to remove segments from the already selected area around the tower, although this is the not the best selection tool to use for this. You can see what it will look like in the screen shot below. 

As you can see it is not the most effective tool to select finely around edges, although this tool would be good for selecting around very straight edges.

Polygonal Lasso Tool

The next tool is the polygonal lasso tool which allows you to click and it creates a dot and then in instant straight line will appear and every time you click it will create an extra line around the object you are trying to select which is effective although it does prove difficult to get it exactly perfect, you can also zoom in to try and get added detail, you can see my attempt in the screen shot below.

So as you can see from the screen shot above it is a lot more effective at selecting the tower than the previous tool, although still it is not perfect. 

Quick Selection Tool

This is my favourite of the selection tools, this is because it is quick and easy and tries to guess at what object you're trying to select based on the colours around the image, an example of this and where to find it is shown in screenshots below. 

Shown in the screenshot above i tried to select the statue on the right of the picture shown by the marching ants line around it, this was quick and easy to do and is relatively good detail because the colours aren't exactly the same, they contrast. 

Lasso Tool

This tool is difficult to use to select things in a picture although when zoomed in to a picture by holding alt and scrolling in with the mouse, it can be more effective. As shown in the screenshot below, you can see I have freehand selected around a blue building in the image.