#24: Adding, Subtracting, Intersecting the Active Selection: Fast

Posted on 12:36 PM by Daniy

Selection. It’s the keyword that will occupy most of your activity when you’re working on Photoshop. Since Photoshop is the bitmap based image editor, the exact things you need to work with are those bunch of bitmaps. A group of digital boxes each contains value of certain color which gathered and forms the entire of your smile picture.

If you tend to make operation on the overall image, selection importance hasn’t come to its way. But if you want to change only certain part of your picture [i.e.: alter your lips or eyes color], then selection is the creature which you’re gonna deal with.

In every case of my Photoshop experience, I found out that I should make more than one selection to convince me that the selection has put itself on the right place. It helps me to avoid unwanted cropped hair or unusual finger shapes. Usually I put my trust to do the first selection on Magnetic lasso tool, and let the rest done with Polygonal lasso tool. And here’s how I do it fast.

use the shift, alt, and both combination to modify your selection faster


Look at the Option bar when you activate the Lasso tool. You’ll find the four icons, each represents the tools habit: new, add, subtract, and intersect. Normally, you can click on it manually but since you have a keyboard on your computer, we’re gonna forget it for a while. Press and hold “Shift” to add selection, "Alt" [Mac: Option] to subtract, and "Shift+Alt" [Mac: Shift+Option] to intersect.

add selection icon is seen above the pointer


Maybe it’s quite hard for you which key to add, subtract, or intersect. Well, fortunately the cursor will give you a hint at this. When you press the "Shift" you’ll see the plus sign at the top right of the cursor. That means you’re gonna add some selection. This works for every key you press. And don’t forget to hold the space bar whenever you need to navigate while doing selection. It helps me a lot.


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