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Selection areas are very important in image editing, particularly so with Paint Shop Pro. Basically, creating a selection area allows you to edit only a certain portion of the image, without affecting the parts of the image that lie outside the boundaries of the selection area. While a selection is active, any filters you run, color fills you perform, painting you do, or color adjustments you make, will only affect the area inside the moving dotted lines (or 'marching ants' as they're often called). Also, any resizing, rotating, flipping, or mirroring you do while the selection area will only affect the selection area, not the whole image (unless you have the 'all layers' box checked).
There are several ways to create a selection area, but this is the major one. The first basic way of creating a selection area is by using either the selection shape tool or lasso tool. If you check the 'antialias' box in the
TOOL CONTROLS WINDOW, the selection you create will have smoothed out edges, even on diagonal lines or curved edges. This is one major advantage that painting in Paint Shop Pro has over painting in N3's PaintShop. If you don't check the box, you'll get those ugly jaggies. Yuck, man. Unless you're doing rectangles, you'll probably always want the anti-alias box on. ;)
The other way to create a selection area is the 're-selecting trick'. We'll discuss that later.
You can also add to, and subtract from, selection areas. Let's say you have a rectangle selection area with the marching ants doin' their thing. Hold down CTRL and make another rectangle inside that one… WHOA, it cut out the area inside the smaller rectangle! You can literally make any shape this way. You can also cut areas out around the edges. You can cut a circle out of a rectangle, or use the lasso tool to cut a shape that you define from a selection area. There's a lot of flexibility with this.
The pictures to the right are just an example. The top image shows you what a rectangle selection area looks like. Basically, you activate the shape selection tool, choose 'rectangle' from the drop-down list in the Tool Controls Window, and then start from one corner and drag to the opposite corner until you've got the area that you want. Pretty straight forward. If you check the anti-alias box BEFORE you draw the rectangle, your selection area will have softened edges. You can't change a non-antialiased selection area after it's been drawn (not effectively, anyway). So decide whether you need it beforehand.
Now if you hold down the CTRL key and create another rectangle inside of your original one, you'll see something like what's in the second image. That doesnt mean a whole lot when you just look at it like that, so let's look at the third image, where I used the fill tool with a darker blue, and NOW you get the idea. By holding down CTRL, I 'un-selected' or subtracted an area from the whole. Holding down SHIFT while you do that adds to the selection area, like in the last image.
So, as you can see, shapes that can't be made just from the 4 basic selection shapes PSP5 gives you (PSP6 gives you several more; rounded rectangles, etc.) can be generated this way. The last image is just the rectangle above, with 4 ellipses added to each side. The inside half of each one overlapped the original selection area, which is why you only see the outer half. This one shape alone could be used as the backdrop for a logo that goes on the hood. So as you can see, selection areas are VERY powerful. Their main function is to allow us to edit only certain portions of an image or layer without affecting everything else in the image or layer.
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Now, once you've got a selection area you think you might want to use later, you have two options for saving it for later recall. You can save it to an Alpha Channel, which somehow (not sure exactly how) saves the selection area with the image (depending on what type of file you save it as. JPGs, PSPs, PSDs, and BMPs, save the alpha channels, PCXs files do NOT save them, so create .PSP back-ups for any cars you want to save the alpha channels on). Selections saved in Alpha Channels are only available to THAT image.
You can also save the selection area to disk. That basically creates a file on your hard disk that you can load later (through the Selections Menu). I have saved out files for the outline of the car at normal size and at twice the size (you do too, you downloaded it earlier. <G>). I also have one that's the outline of the car in the Driver Info Screen, and I use that for the screenshots of the cars you see here at RPS. Selections saved to disk can be loaded into any file. ;)
As you tinker with selection areas, you'll start to get an idea of just how powerful they are, and what you can accomplish using them. Combined with layers, they make the possibilities of what you can create virtually limitless (depending on how hard and long you're willing to work on getting a specific result). I could go on for days, but you've got enough information to do some experimentation and take the next steps on your own. After all, I wanna teach you how to paint a car, not do it for you. ;)
Now I'm going to teach you your first real trick. It's not glitzy or glamorous, but it's INCREDIBLY useful. ;)
On to the next lesson with you!
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