Lasso Tool will not select in Illustrator CS5

Question

I'm extremely frustrated beginner. I am making color charts for my Etsy store and need to cut out spools of thread colors from a bunch of jpegs I saved and arrange them onto a new screen in a row and label the colors. I usually just make colored circles or squares and then label them but I thought I would cut out the jpg's from the thread supplier and just use THE ACTUAL PHOTOS instead of making boring colored circles. But when I lasso just the spool of thread, without the big white background, the selection line goes away ( i don't get the ants!) and the line is then going around the whole photo instead. The youtube vids all say to just lasso it and then grab it with the pointer and drag it to where you want it. It's not working! Already spent hours on trying to fix why it is not working,.

How do I get my lasso tool to work? I want to cut out the spool of thread and then move it onto my big white board. Is this possible?

tromboniator · Answer

Illustrator is not really designed for dealing with pixel-based images, such as jpg. You would be better off in Photoshop. If you are limited to Illustrator you could try using the Pen Tool to create the shape of the spool and apply it as a Clipping Mask, then Flatten Transparency to get you closer to the isolated image you want.

The Lasso tool in Illustrator will absolutely not work for this task. Are you sure the tutorials are about Illustrator? and jpg? I have doubts.

Peter

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