3 Ways to Select Anything in Photoshop, From the Lasso Tool to AI

Almost every Photoshop edit beyond a global adjustment starts with telling the software which pixels to touch. Get that step wrong, and every brightening pass, color shift, and composite you build on top of it shows its seams.

Unmesh Dinda of PiXimperfect sorts every selection method into three groups: manual tools you steer by hand, automatic functions that find subjects and skies for you, and specialized techniques for color, fur, and fine hair. He starts at the manual end with the Lasso Tool and the Polygonal Lasso Tool. The small habits are what stick. If you misplace a point with the polygonal version, Backspace on Windows or Delete on a Mac steps back one click at a time, and Escape throws out the whole selection. Dinda admits he redrew selections from scratch for years before learning that. Holding Alt or Option mid-stroke flips the freehand lasso into straight-line mode, so you can trace around a head by hand and then finish with quick straight clicks without starting over.

The Quick Selection Tool comes next, with a reminder to check Sample All Layers when the pixels you want sit on a different layer from the one you're working on. From there, the lesson moves into combining tools, and selections start to feel more like building a shape than tracing one. Holding Shift while dragging a marquee locks it to a perfect circle or square. Holding Space lets you reposition it before you let go, Alt or Option subtracts, and Shift plus Alt or Option keeps only the intersection. Dinda carves a catchlight out of a few ellipses and a lasso stroke, then fills it with white, blurs it as a smart filter, and sets it to Overlay. The same keyboard logic carries over to almost every selection tool in the program.

On the automatic side, the Object Selection Tool has a Select People option in the options bar that detects everyone in the frame. It lets you pick parts of a person, such as eyebrows, irises, or upper clothes. Layer > Mask All Objects goes further and builds a separate masked group for every object Photoshop recognizes, so you can recolor water or a single boat with an adjustment layer in seconds. Select Subject runs on one of two engines. Cloud processing is more accurate and sends the image to Adobe's servers, while device processing stays on your machine and works offline. You can switch per use from the drop-down next to the button or set a default under Preferences > Image Processing, and Remove Background in the Contextual Task Bar combines the selection and the mask into one click.

Choosing between cloud and device processing is a decision you now face across a lot of editing software, as Adobe, Apple, and others split AI features between local hardware and remote servers. For client work under a nondisclosure agreement, unreleased products, or images of minors, keeping processing on your own computer is the conservative choice. Adobe's device option makes that possible without giving up Select Subject. Credits add another layer. Adobe meters many generative features through generative credits, and Dinda points out which tools in the lesson draw on them and which don't, so learning the non-generative route pays off for any task you repeat often. The manual tools also keep their value as the automatic ones improve. Whenever an AI selection grabs too much or too little, the fix is usually a brush on the mask or an Alt-drag with a lasso, which means the oldest tools in the toolbar end up cleaning up after the newest ones.

The later sections handle the harder cases. In a tennis composite, hair that's cleanly masked still carries the dark color of its original background. Dinda sets the subject layer to Screen, then stacks a normal copy on top and masks that copy away at the edges, so the brightening reaches only the hair. Select and Mask returns for fur that Select Subject misses, along with Decontaminate Colors, which pushes edge pixels outward while the mask stays put. Color Range pulls a green screen out from behind a sheer veil. Select > Modify > Expand gives the Remove Tool enough room to erase a person without leaving stray hairs behind.

The video closes on a lighter note, with a face swap onto the Mona Lisa built from a rough lasso selection and Auto-Blend Layers.