People accuse me of occasionally giving accurate but useless answers to their questions. Ask me why the sky is blue, and I'm likely to say "Rayleigh scattering."
That sort of thing happened recently when a friend, obviously annoyed with his image editing program, asked me why there were so many different selection tools to choose from. "Because making selections is such an important capability!" I immediately replied. Afterwards, I tutored him with some real-world examples of how the various selection tools can be used. This week I'll share them with you.
When you need to make a selection within a digital photo, the goal is often to separate an object from the background--so you can fiddle with the colors, exposure, or sharpness in one area, for example, without affecting the rest of the photo. Or you might want to clip an object out of the photo and use it in a different project. That's one reason why image editing programs like Corel Paint Shop Pro (which I'll use as my example this week) offer more than one kind of tool to choose from. Different tools work better than others in certain situations.
Suppose you wanted to cut an arbitrary section out of a photo, for instance. There are no obvious edges to cut along, so in a situation like this you might have the most luck with the Freehand or Point to Point tool.
To get started with the Freehand selection tool, open a photo in Paint Shop Pro and then click the Freehand selection tool, which lives in the third cubby in the toolbar on the left side of the screen.
In the Tool Options palette at the top of the screen, choose
Neither Freehand nor Point to Point have any built-in intelligence to help you. Wherever you click, you mark your selection.
But they do have their differences. Freehand lets you make a smooth, arbitrary shape--the tool perfectly follows any motion you make with the mouse. Contrast that with the Point to Point tool: Each time you click, the tool creates a straight line, which allows you to make a complex (but artificially angular) shape with the selection tool.
Those tools are fine occasionally, but in my experience, most of the selections we commonly make are based on following an existing edge in a photo. That's how we select people, pets, cars, Bigfoot, and all sorts of other elements in a photo.
The Edge Seeker is perfect for this kind of job (look in the Tool Options palette to find the tool). Now we're selecting in style; just click on the edge you want to follow, and then click again a short distance further along. The tool automatically senses the edge (it looks for a sharp change in contrast) and selects the best path to keep the object selected.
Smart Edge, located in the Tool Options palette under Selection Type, works almost exactly the same way. Just use whichever tool feels the most natural to you.
What if you don't have an easily defined edge, but you want to select a large region of similar color, like the sky or a field of green grass?
In a situation like that, the Magic Wand (located in the third cubby on the left, with the Freehand tool) might be a better choice. Select the tool and click in the middle of the uniform color area. This should select a big swatch of your image. You might need to increase or decrease the Tolerance level to select the right amount of your photo; when you select Magic Wand, the Tolerance setting appears in the Tool Options palette.
Tolerance controls how similar colors need to be in order to be selected with a single click. If the Tolerance is too low, not much gets selected in one click. Too high, and you'll find that you'll select a lot more of the photo than you intend.
That's a quick study of all the selection tools you're likely to find in your favorite image editing program. But there's a lot more we can say about making selections, so tune in next week for some additional tips.
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Dave Johnson
