Expert: Scott Valentine - 7/22/2008

Question
Hello, I have a pc running Windows XP and Photoshop CS3.  I work on large digital files (25 Mb) and use the magnetic lasso tool to cut out the background.  I have been having problems with Photoshop crashing while using this tool.  Any suggestions on solving this problem or an alternate tool choice that works as well as the magnetic lasso tool for removing backgrounds.  Your help is greatly appreciated as it gets very frustrating to almost complete a selection and have the system crash.

Answer
Hi Kris,

There may be a handful of reasons for your system problems, so you may want to consider some maintenance on your PC, and possibly more RAM if practical. However, I have no way of knowing if these solutions will work for you.

What I can give you is some ideas on alternate methods that let you build up your selection and save it from time to time. This way, if your system crashes you still have your last saved point, and you can go from there. Also, some of these methods use less memory during processing than the Magnetic Lasso tool.

First, I hope you are using the Lasso tool to create masks, not just cutouts where you delete your image data. This kind of destructive editing is one-way, so mistakes are very difficult, if not impossible, to correct. If you are not familiar with masks, check out my free tutorial on CommunityMX.com:

http://communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?cid=40311

That should give you almost everything you need to get going with masks. From there, you should learn about the Pen Tool for creating selections that you can save and adjust. The Pen Tool lets you build Paths, which are essentially vectors within Photoshop (if you need information on vector versus raster, please ask!). The advantage to using paths for some kinds of selections is that you can get very smooth, editable edges to create your masks.

Another tool you should consider is the Extract tool. It behaves a lot like the magnetic lasso tool, but has more flexibility in selecting edges. A quick read through Photoshop's help file will get you going. However, I don't recommend the Extract Tool for non-destructive editing (unless you work on a copy or duplicated layer).

I hope this helps you with your work! If you have more questions, please feel free to ask =)

-Scott