The “elliptical marquee” tool is useful in selecting oval or circular shaped objects. If you press “shift,” it makes a perfect circle, and if you press “option” if allows you to start the marquee in the middle and drag outward.
The “lasso” tool is helpful in selecting a very specific object, but it is difficult because it takes a careful hand and often leaves white space around the edges of the shape. After an object is selected, you can press “shift” for a positive marquee to add part of the object to the marquee, or “option” for a negative marquee to subtract part of the object from the marquee.
The “polygonal lasso” tool is helpful in selecting objects with a straight line because it works in the same fashion as the pen tool in Illustrator.
The “magnetic lasso” tool selects objects that have defined lines or borders. When moving the mouse around an object, this tool follows the shape easily and cleanly. If it is not exact, the “lasso” tool can be selected again and the “shift” and “option” commands be use to add or subtract from the marquee.
The “magic wand” tool is helpful in selecting and detecting blocks of color in objects. You can “shift” click multiple objects to marquee them based on their color.
As in the skeleton example, in order to clear the background within the skull, I used the “magic wand” tool to select the cream colored space, then deleted it. This left the checkered background that tells us that nothing exists in that space. Then I used the lasso tool to easily select multiple shapes at a time without the extra white color around them.
When I finished marqueeing and copy & pasting every item from the original skeleton to the new skeleton, I used the crop tool and the paint bucket tool to save only my new skeleton with the black background.
Important tips: The object layer you are working with has to be selected if you want to work on that object. “Command J” can be used to copy an object and add it to a new layer.
Computer Graphics: Molly Brennan 