


Option-shift-clicking will center a constrained circular selection. With the elliptical marquee tool selected, clicking and dragging makes an oval shape, shift-clicking will constrain it to a circle and option clicking centers it. Click and hold on the marquee tool on the toolbar to find the elliptical marquee option below. Simple! Hold the shift key and constrain it to a square option click to center on the area clicked, and option-shift-click and the centered selection will be a square. Select the rectangular marquee, then click and drag to form a rectangular selection. Perhaps the simplest Photoshop selection tools are the rectangular and elliptical marquee tools. Here’s a rundown of our favorite Photoshop selection tools and what sets each of them apart. The better the selection, the better the result, so which selection tools you choose really matters when precision is important.

And in many cases, all those special effects start with selections-choosing which pixels a given effect will apply to. From complex composites to unbelievable photorealistic art, Photoshop makes anything possible.
Marquee tool software#
Once you've zoomed in, hold down your spacebar by itself to temporarily switch to the Hand Tool, then click and drag the image along the selection outline to look for problems.As most every photographer surely knows, Photoshop image editing software is capable of doing incredible things. To zoom in, press and hold Ctrl+spacebar (Win) / Command+spacebar (Mac) to temporarily switch to Photoshop's Zoom Tool, then click inside the document window once or twice to zoom in (to zoom back out later, press and hold Alt+spacebar (Win) / Option-spacebar (Mac) and click inside the document window). To inspect the selection outline for any problem areas, it usually helps to be zoomed in on the image. Not to worry though, since we can easily go back and fix up the problem areas, which we'll do next! Adding To The Initial Selection
Marquee tool manual#
Since the Lasso Tool is essentially a manual selection tool that relies heavily on your own drawing skills, as well as on the accuracy and performance of your mouse, you'll probably end up with an initial selection outline that falls well short of perfect, as mine did. The initial selection is complete, but there's quite a few problem areas that need fixing. With the Lasso Tool selected, your mouse cursor will appear as a small lasso icon, and you simply click at the spot in the document where you want to begin the selection, then continue holding your mouse button down and drag to draw a freeform selection outline:

Of all the selection tools in Photoshop, the Lasso Tool is probably the easiest to use and understand because you simply drag a freehand selection around the object or area you want to select, in a similar way to how you would outline something on a piece of paper with a pen or pencil.
Marquee tool how to#
We covered how to change the option in the Preferences for switching between tools in the Elliptical Marquee Tool tutorial. It's the tool that looks like the sort of lasso you'd find a cowboy swinging at a rodeo:Įach of the three types of lasso tool gives us a different way to draw selections.Īll three lasso tools share the letter L as their keyboard shortcut for selecting them, so depending on how you have things set up in Photoshop's Preferences, you can cycle through the three tools either by pressing the letter L repeatedly or by pressing Shift+L. The one we'll be looking at in this tutorial is the standard Lasso Tool, which you can access by clicking on its icon in the Tools panel. Photoshop actually gives us three variations of lasso to work with. This tutorial is from our How to make selections in Photoshop series.ĭownload this tutorial as a print-ready PDF! But if you have a good quality mouse (or even better, a pen tablet), decent drawing skills and a little patience, you may find that the Lasso Tool, another of Photoshop's basic selection tools, is all you need.
Marquee tool professional#
If you're a more advanced Photoshop user, you'll probably head straight for the Pen Tool, the tool of choice for making professional quality form-based selections. But what if we need to select something in a photo that's a little more complex, like someone's eyes, an item of clothing, or maybe a car or a bottle? Something that still has a clearly defined form to it but is beyond the capabilities of Photoshop's geometry-based Marquee Tools. So far in our journey through Photoshop's various selection tools, we've looked at how the Rectangular Marquee Tool allows us to easily draw selections based on simple rectangular or square shapes, and how the Elliptical Marquee Tool extends our selection making abilities into the exciting world of ovals and circles.
