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If your object is a rectangle or oval you can use the Rectangular Marquee Tool  (m) to select that space. Simply click and drag from one corner to another and it selects. From there you can fade, add, feather, subtract, and everything else you did with wand selections simply by right clicking, going to the Select dropdown (Img 8), or looking at the Options Window. Again, pressing Alt subtracts and Shift adds in combination with this tool.
Too often the object being selected isn’t a square. A head, for instance, even in the most boring of people, is not square.
This is where our friend the lasso pops in. The lasso  (L) comes in a variety of flavors. To select the different types of lassos, simply press and hold down over the button in the tools window until a few choices pop up. This works on any of the tool button with a little arrow in the bottom right of the icon. By pressing shift plus the letter for that tool you can accomplish the same goal. For instance, shift+L selects the polygonal lasso first, then the magnetic lasso, and then the free form lasso, and then back again. This is because L is the hotkey for lassos. For marquees, shift+M sorts through those options, while Shift+I sorts through the choices under the eye dropper(not yet discussed.)
The types of lassos are are polygonoal lasso (discussed below), free form lasso (or simply titled lasso) which follows exactly where you take it as long as you hold down the mouse button, and magnetic lasso where it unsuccessfully tries to follow an edge. By all means play with the others, but polygonal lasso allows for the most control so we’ll cover that here. Basically you click on points, it creates a straight line between each successive point (Img 10b), and once you either double click or touch your starting point you’ve made a selection. If you make a mistake, pressing delete undoes the last click. After a selection is made you can press shift and alt in conjuction with clicking to add and subtract respectively, just as we saw with the magic wand and the marquee tool.
Trace until the selection is finished or instead do it one section at a time, holding shift+click to add each new section. Selecting in sections minimizes mistakes caused by accidentally double clicking and ruining what you were tracing. To invert the selection use Select>Inverse (Ctrl + Shift + I). If you're selecting a head to get it out of an image, you can trace around it, and then by inverting the selection and pressing delete you'll delete the unwanted part instead of deleting the much prized head.
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Img 8. Selection Drop Down
 Img. 9 Feather Selection Pop Up
Img 10.Magic Wand Option Window
Img 10b. Polygonal Lasso Tool in action |
