Exercises > Creating Outlines

Creating Outlines in Photoshop
ByAaron Ng

There are three Lasso tools available in Photoshop. We will be using only one of them for this exercise, but the differences will be discussed later. The art for this exercise is located in the IVLE workbin in Assignments > Art for Exercises > jet.psd. Download the image and save a copy in your Source File. Open the psd file in Photoshop.

1. Select the Magnetic Lasso tool. If it is not visible, click on the button and hold it down until all 3 lasso tools appear for selection.
2. Place your Magnetic Lasso pointer on the wing tip of the plane and click ONCE. After that, use your mouse to trace the outline of the plane. You will see little squares (anchor points) appear and sticking to the outline of the plane as you move (hence the name Magnetic Lasso). These anchor points will help to create the final selection for outlining. Before you complete the outline, you can delete anchor points by pressing the Backspace key. When you are almost back to the wing tip, bring your mouse over the first anchor point (which will be indicated by a circle on the tool tip) and click. You will now see 'marching ants' around the plane and the outline is complete.
3. Click on Refine Edge to apply feathering to smooth out rough edges.
4. You can copy this outline and paste it into a new file. Or if you set the background colour in the tool box to the same colour as your web page background or paper. you can choose Select > Inverse and have the marching ants move to the outside of the image. Delete the selected background. Save as a TIFF,, JPG or GIF, depending on how you use the outline.

Notes:

Sometimes, the Magnetic Lasso Tool predicts the outline wrongly and may not place an anchor point when required. If this happens, you will have to manually add in the anchor point by moving the tool tip to where you wish to add the anchor point and clicking once.

The difference between the Magnetic Lasso and the Polygonal Lasso is that the Polygonal Lasso tool will not automatically place anchor points for you. You will have to place all anchor points manually by clicking on the locations where you wish to set one.

The Lasso tool does not use anchor points. You click and hold down the mouse button at the starting point and just trace the outline of the object. However, unless you have a drawing tablet, it is hard to draw a good outline using the Lasso tool.

Another tool to do an outline in Photoshop is the Magic Wand tool. The magic wand tool works only if the object to be outlined is on a background with fairly even tones. If the background is too busy, you will need to use the one of the Lasso tools. The art for this exercise is also jet.psd. Open the original image in Photoshop.

1. Click on the Magic Wand tool to activate it.
2. Set the Tolerance level to 50. You will need to experiment with different tolerance levels for other pictures you wish to outline. The higher the tolerance level, the less sensitive the Magic Wand is to changes in tone.
3. Click on any part of the blue sky. You will see 'marching ants' around the entire blue sky.
4. Do a right click on any part of the blue sky bounded by the 'marching ants' and choose the Select > Inverse option. This will select the plane as we are now selecting everything that was previously unselected.
5. Click on Refine Edge to apply feathering to soften any hard edges that might have emerged.
6. Press Ctrl-C to copy the outlined image and paste the image into a new file. Save as a TIFF, GIF or JPG.
   
   
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