I make it sound so glorious, don't I? As you're painting along over the coming months, you're going to encounter times when you have an antialiased object that you'd like to edit, whether it be to change the color, shape, contents, or whatever.

So here's what you can do, provided that the object isn't touching something else and it's on a layer separate from the background layer (which it should be. As I said in the opening rules, you should NEVER be painting on the background layer.) you can 're-select' that object and get the marching ants around it again. The benefit of that is, once the area/object is selected, you can set the fill tolerance to 200 and fill away, and it will change the entire object to the new color, and you don't lose your anti-alias, goof it up, or fill the whole layer on accident.

It's a ridiculously simple trick, and there are two ways to do it. Here's our lowly little circle chillin' in the middle of the screen on it's own layer. Unfortunately, it's blue and I want it to be red (don't ask my why, I just do! ). If I use the fill tool on it, it will fill all the smoothing pixels with solid red, and you lose your anti-aliasing. CTRL-Z is all you can do if that happens. Ok, so how do we get it so that when you fill the object, the smoothing pixels change to the correct shades of red so that we get a red circle that fades from red to the background color?

Here's what you do, use the Selection Shape Tool and draw a box around the object. (The magic wand works, too... with the tolerance set to 200. Just click anywhere on the object.) Doesn't have to be exact, just make sure the object/text is completely inside the box. Now left-click anywhere on the object& Holy Schmoley, it's selected. Now fill it with a different color (I used red, see the last image). Just make sure you have the fill tolerance set to 200, or it might not get the outside pixels. With this trick, the antialiasing stays, it just changes color to match. Pretty neat, huh?

The other way to re-select is to draw the box around the object (or circle or ellipse, doesn't matter) and CUT it out instead of just clicking on the object (CTRL-X is 'cut'). Then PASTE AS NEW SELECTION (CTRL-E). Both work equally well, I tend to use the second method, just because I used it for a long time before I figured out the first method would do the same thing. ;)

Practice this guy for a while. I use it constantly, and you will, too. Remember, if the object isn't by itself on a layer or has other objects that you put on top of it in the layer, this won't work. Now you should start realizing the importance of limiting each object to it's own layer while painting a car. If you stick to that, and aren't TOO anxious to merge layers, you'll always be able to go back and make changes and adjustments very easily.

The 'Re-selecting' trick is probably the most frequently used among all my tricks. I change my mind a lot as I get further along in the painting process, and being able to go back and make changes this way is VERY useful.