Affinity Photo - Lasso Tool Explained

Key Takeaways

today you will learn ten important facts about how to use the lasso tool hello my friends my name is Olivia I'm a professional designer from the NI Austria and let's get started so the lasso tool you can find here on the left where all of your tools are if you don't see this little lasso here or Oh as its otherwise called freehand selection tool it might be hidden behind these other selection tool rectangle tool elliptical tool all of those so click and hold you get these this pop-up menu and then select the lasso down here and up here you have all these kind of tool settings and informations to work with the first one is the freehand tool and this is especially useful if you feel comfortable drawing a selection with the freehand or you have an iPad or you have one of these graphic tablets with a pen where you can easily select something then this is a pretty quick way let's zoom in here a little bit and you can see I can just draw around this shape and try to get the edge I'm using a mouse you can see it's not the most exact way to do that it's better really when you have a graphic tablet or iPad something like that where you can really draw on the screen so let's hit ctrl D to deselect and let's go to the second mode which is one of my favorite modes and that's called polygonal mode for summaries and what it does actually is that I mean you're drawing polygons so that's the right name but I would call it differently because basically what you do is lines so with this selected with every click you make a point and you get a straight line between these points and this is really useful as you can see because it's super fast and it's very precise and when you make enough points it does look pretty rounds even on round edges so that's pretty nice and another thing that's useful with this mode is that you can use your spacebar and you can move the picture around if you need to go to an area that is outside of the area that you have seen before and this is something that actually I even didn't know about in affinity photo because I use it normally in a different way what I do is I have the freehand mode and then you can hold the shift key and with the shift key you can also make these straight lines so this is what I used to do but with this I can't use my spacebar because I would press two buttons at the same time and then it would just make a selection so this is a lot more useful to have this polygonal mode so for these kind of selections that very very that's very very useful ok let's go to the third type that is an interesting type it doesn't really work that well and you can you should use it in special cases because the magnetic mode is used where you have edges with a high contrast so you can see here I click once and then I don't click again and it's selecting the edge on its own it's trying to find the edge but as soon as I come here the tool is getting confused by these other lines so it's not working anymore so this is only really useful when you have a shape where there is a really high contrast to be easily found by this kind of magnetic tool magnetic selection tool I would wish they had some settings where I can set how how do you say precise it should be or how how high the resonance should be I'm not finding the right bird art now right now sorry ok but you can see this is not very useful in these cases what it is useful for is when you have something with a high contrast let's make two shapes here let's make a round shape in the middle make it a different color there we go and now if I use the magnetic mode up here I click once and then I can quickly move around the edge with my mouse I don't even have to be very precise and selecting this you can see this works very well because there's a very high contrast because between these two colors and between these two shapes speaking of shapes what you can see up here also for the modes is that you have new add substract and intersect so those are very important and this is how you use them let's go back to the freehand tool so I can play explain it a little bit quicker and go up here where we have it's easier to see so with new when I make a selection you can see this makes a selection every time I click it makes a new selection so it doesn't remember the old selection and this might be bet for reasons where you want to have several selections after another because you want to select several areas in your picture because you want to take a break between selections you want to have something where you can add multiple selections and this is what this second mode does add and the good thing about IDI is not only can I make selections in different areas you can see here now I have three different selections in different areas if I if they overlap they also add to each others you can see here now I have a combination of these two selections which is very useful Youth useful sorry especially when I want to add something so you can see here for example there's an area that is not selected but should be selected I can go in here and edit afterwards and of course I can also switch between these so if I go to substract I can also go in here and subtract areas that I don't want to have selected these are not very clean selections right now I'm just showing you how it works you can see here I can just cut out different kind of areas and now we come to the last mode and this is called the intersect mode and let's make one selection here whoops sorry let's go to new let's make one selection here and now when I go to the entry sect mode if I draw a second selection it will only keep the part in the middle where both of them are intersecting you can see this is just the middle ground of those two selection so that is maybe not apparently obvious why this could be useful but I want to show you something with another tool let's draw another rectangle up here I will make it black so we can see better what I am doing okay and now if I for example use the elliptical tool and I set it to intersect so let's make one shape first you can see I have a circle here and then if I use the intersect mode with this tool you can see if I draw out my selection will only show the intersecting area and with this as you can see you can have really strange and interesting shapes for the selection so that is pretty nice and there is also something that you could not easily do with the other modes like add or subtract so to have these kind of special selections to get these kind of special shapes as you can see here it looks a little bit like a Spider Man I if you want to create a character like that that might be very useful and kind of tool for that okay let's go to the other elements that we still have not explained up here there is still more feather it's important Antti allies is important to refine is also very important to explain this I will disable the picture so we just have our rectangle here let's make this let's make this smaller and also rasterize it so it's pixeled there we go now it's in pixel and now if we use the tool you can see here well let's explain let's explain a feather first there we go so I make a selection whoops wrong mode again I make a selection as you can see here and now I go ctrl C to copy it ctrl V to put it in the picture on the canvas you can see here we have made a selection and you can see of course now we have sharp edges as we of course want to have with most selections but if you want to have a blurred selection which is also useful in many cases you can set it right here with feather and the important thing to notice is you have to set it before you make the selection if you change feather after you make the selection able for some reason not impact the selection so this has to be set before hands so let's set this for example let's write in here let's set this to 5 pixels for example I make a selection and then again control C control V control D to deselect and if I move this whoops did I not okay apparently I did not make a selection because I was on the wrong layer let's do this again there we go mm-hmm deselect and there we have our selection you can see the edges are blurred so that is very nice very nice feature that you can do right while you are selecting although what I would suggest to you is not use this up here and instead make a normal selection and then go up here to your settings for selection and here you have feather again but now you can apply to select to the selection you already have and this is very useful because you can see a little bit umm how it is changing by making it more feathered or softer you can see because the outline is changing sadly affinity for does not show you the difference so you can't really see it but you can kind of guess it from the change of the this kind of moving line here so let's apply this control C control we control D to deselect and I was again on the wrong layer okay let's do this again with the right layer there we go they select and move it over here and you can see now this is a lot more blurred a lot softer edge okay the next thing that is really important and it's very easily overlooked with selections is analyzing and I want to explain to you what that is I'm not going to use the lasso tool for that although it also works with the lasso tool but it's easier to see it with the elliptical tool so what I'm going to do is I'm going to turn off and realize and I'm going to make a circular selection here there we go and I will copy this over to here and then I will make a second circular selection let's go there we go oh one second I turn on and realize I will make a second circular selection also copy this and move it over and then we soo-min and what you can see here is with a normal selection without antia lysing on if you have a curve the curve is still represented in pixels and the pixels as you can see here they have hard edges where they are actually ending so this is a very sharp and correct edge and this is how actually the edge looks even if it is round even if it's a curve everything you see on your screen is made of pixels and the pixels are squares so it's always in these kind of steps but if you have angel izing on what that does is it kind of blurs them out you can see here it creates additional pixels with lesser and lesser opacity and this will make it look less blocky and a lot sharper so if we go to 100% here you can see that here you can see these sharp edges and here it looks to the eye pretty round pretty smooth so it's very nice you see a little bit of step still but it is still a very sharp it's a big difference so this is why you should use that maybe not always because sometimes you really want the sharp edges but in most cases especially when you have curves in your selection you want to use anti align so this was all to know about the lasso tool all the kind of different modes that you have to use that kind of tools you can see it's really useful oh by the way up here there's one more it's refine you can use refine with any kind of selection you're doing let's go into that real quick and there is something you really should look out for let's make a selection up here whoops let's make a selection real quick by the way oh there's one thing I still have to tell you and this is when you have the polygonal mode like I have right now and it makes these lines when you hold the shift key it turns into magnetic mode so yeah okay this wasn't what I wanted to do let's make a new selection real quick there we go so if you have this kind of selection let's go up here let's close this and now you click refine it will like with other selection tools you can refine the selection with all these kind of settings I'm not going to explain these right now because this is a different kind of tutorial the one thing although to point out here is that you have this overlays you can turn to black and white and really see how the selections looking and what you see right now is that refine is even if you don't click any of these settings even if you don't do anything refine is changing your selection and personally I think it doesn't really work very well I hope serif' is really updating this kind of functional you can see here it's really pixelated and kind of rough and it looks very different so if you use the lasso tool maybe don't use the refine function because not working very well it's mostly used and with the selection brush that's found over here I will explain this in an other episode and by the way the next episode will be about the selection settings or changes up here especially those down here grow and shrink feathers smooth refine edges an outline what they are doing because they are very important also to use with any kind of selection tool but this was the explanation for how to use the lasso tool any different options that you have thank you very much for watching if you like my tutorials maybe subscribe to my channel I - two tutorials per week and if you want to support me even more head over to patreon where you can find even more good things like my files with all the layers you can get feedback on your works and we can talk about topics that are interesting to you thank you very much and see you soon bye