If you are a regular user of Photoshop, you will find it rather time consuming to select each tool from the tool bar manually. To save time, you can use the shortcut keys which can speed up the process of selecting the tools.

Below is a link for Photoshop keyboard shortcuts for both windows and mac:
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/Photoshop/11.0/WS24E993BC-E1F3-4ac6-8225-7685C3B17669a.html

You can also customise your own Photoshop keyboard shortcut. This avoids you having to use the default shortcuts. To customise the shortcuts you can either select:

• Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts (Windows)
• Windows > Workspace > Keyboard Shortcuts (Mac)

To find more information on keyboard shortcuts checkout:
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/Photoshop/11.0/WSfd1234e1c4b69f30ea53e41001031ab64-76b7a.html

The standard lasso and the polygonal lasso have options like the Marquee tools which are:

• New selection – This is the default, a new selection made every time you use the standard or polygonal lasso. The old selection will get removed when a new selection is made.
• Add to selection – This adds more selections from the current selected areas when you use this option.
• Subtraction from selection – This subtracts selection from the current selected areas.
• Intersect from selection – This option keeps the section from the intersected area of two selections.

The magnetic lasso has a different set of options which are:

• Width – The pixel width of the magnetic lasso. The maximum width value is 256px.
• Edge contrast – The sensitivity of the edges in the images, the value ranges from 1 – 100 %.
• Frequency – The rate the lasso detects and sets to the edges of the image. The greater the value the more frequent the anchor points.
• Stylus Pressure – This is for if you are using a graphics tablet, the more pressure you apply the smaller the edge width.

There are 3 main kinds of Lasso tools in Photoshop which are :

• The standard lasso
• Polygonal lasso
• Magnetic lasso

The standard lasso

The standard lasso is a tool used for drawing freeform selections. You use this tool like a pen, you click and hold down the mouse and draw your selection on the image. To draw straight lines you can hold down the Alt key. The standard lasso is useful for making quick selections on an image, although the selected areas will not be accurate. If you make a mistake when using the lasso you can simply double-click and start your selection again.




Polygonal lasso

The polygonal lasso is a tool used for drawing straight edged selection. This tool is similar to the standard lasso, but draws straight selections instead of free forms selections. To use this tool, you click the location where you want your first point for the selection, and keep clicking until you end your selection. If you want to erase the selection you can hit the Delete key. Also, if you want to draw freehand you can hold down the Alt key.




Magnetic lasso

The magnetic lasso is a tool for snapping to the edges of an area of an image. To use this tool, you click the initial starting point and use the mouse to follow the edges of the object where you want to select. You can either hold the down mouse button or release the button when using this tool. When you moving the mouse it will automatically snap the edge of the object. If the lasso does not snap to the edges you can click once on the mouse, which manually adds an anchor point to the image.



To create a straight edge like the in the polygonal lasso tool you can hold down the Alt key. If you want to erase a point you can hit the delete key which will remove the previous point.

Checkout The lasso tools part 2