74. Select a Straight-Edged Area Before You Begin  70 About Making Selections
See Also  72 Select a Rectangular or Circular
73 Draw a Selection Freehand 75 Select an Object by Tracing Its Edge
If you want to create a selection using straight lines, you can use the Polygonal Lasso tool. With this tool, you mark points along the edge of the image that you want to select, and PhotoShop Elements automatically connects the points with straight lines. This type of selection works well when you want to select the perimeter of an object with straight sides, such as a box or a house. 1. | Select the Lasso Tool
Open an image in the Editor in Standard Edit mode and save it in Photoshop (*.psd) format. In the Layers palette, click the layer that contains the data you want to select.
Select the Lasso tool on the Toolbox. The icon for the last Lasso tool you used is the icon displayed in the Toolbox.
| 2. | Select Polygonal Lasso
TIP  | You can select the exact tool you want in one step: Click the Lasso tool on the Toolbox, hold the mouse button down and, when the pop-up menu appears, choose the Polygonal Lasso tool from the list. |
If it's not already selected, select the Polygonal Lasso tool on the Options bar.
| 3. | Set Options
Set the desired options for the Polygonal Lasso tool on the Options bar such as Anti-aliased or the amount of Feather. Click the New Selection, Add to Selection, Subtract from Selection, or Intersect with Selection button as desired.
 | 4. | Create a Straight-Edged Selection
Click the location on the image where you want to start your selection, move the mouse pointer to where you want to create a corner in the selection, and click the left mouse button again. As you reposition the mouse pointer, a springy line extends between the last anchor point and the mouse pointer so that you can see how the selection line will lay against the area you are selecting.
Continue clicking to create points until you have surrounded the entire area. Make changes to the area within the selection, copy or cut it to another image or layer, or delete the data.
TIP | You must complete all sides of the selection by clicking again on the original selection point (the mouse pointer change to a lasso with a small o under it when you reach the beginning point), pressing the Enter key, or double-clicking the left mouse button. |
After you're satisfied with the result, make any other changes you want and save the PSD file. Resave the result in JPEG or TIFF format, leaving your PSD image with its layers (if any) intact so that you can return at a later time and make different adjustments if you want.
In this example, I used the Polygonal Lasso tool to outline the geometric tile design my husband had created in our front entry. After I selected the design, I could crop the image so that only the interlocking-square design appears in the image.
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