4d Edit Selection

When you are working with the selection tools, you can easily get the impression that selections have hard edges i.e. every pixel is either inside the selection or out of it. But when you read about feathering and anti-aliasing you may have realized that this is not so - it is possible for some pixels to be 'partially selected' so that effects applied to the image are applied to these pixels only to a limited extent. Paint Shop Pro has a neat feature called Edit Selection which allows you to control to what extent each pixel is 'selected' simply by using standard painting tools while in Edit Selection Mode. By the way, Photoshop has a similar feature but gives it a different name: Quick Mask Mode. Photoshop also has a very useful feature called the gradient tool whereas in Paint Shop Pro gradients are treated in a cruder way which will make the following exercise more difficult in Paint Shop Pro than it would be in Photoshop.

As a first introduction to using 'Edit Selection Mode', open any image in Paint Shop Pro, then switch to Edit Section Mode in the Selections menu. You won't notice any difference yet except that the word 'Selection' now appears in the pictures blue title bar and also in the Layers palette if that is open. By looking at the Materials palette, make sure a light colour (or white) is chosen as the foreground colour, then choose the Paintbrush tool and start drawing shapes on the image. Perhaps to your surprise, you will find that you are painting in 'transparent red' on the image - this is not 'real' red colour but rather just an indication that that part of the picture is selected. Now change the foreground colour to a dark colour or black and start painting on the image - you will find that you are not adding colour to the image but the 'transparent red colour' will be erased if you paint over it in this mode. With some of the picture still covered by the transparent red colour, switch out of 'Edit Selection Mode' and back into normal mode and the marching ants will confirm for you that the transparent red area corresponds simply to a selection that you have just created. Don't forget that once you have made a selection, any changes that you apply to the image, such as darkening it for example, will apply ONLY to the selected area. Hopefully you realise by now that being in Edit Selection Mode allows you to make selections by using all kinds of different tools such as the paintbrush, airbrush etc etc - it's more powerful than using the standard selection tools. Don't save the image that you have just experimented with for you are about to do a more sophisticated exercise...

To get some more advanced practice with editing selections, let's use the picture below. I took it in Thailand on a canoeing trip with students of the Hong Kong International School. The stilt house is occupied by a family that farms collects swallows' nests from the caves of this island. Swallows' nests, made from the birds' saliva, are an expensive delicacy in many Asian countries.

Although the picture is already pretty good (I took it myself, after all), we'll try to give it a surreal feel as in the photo below. We want to apply a strong affect to the top of the picture, gradually weakening towards the bottom.

The approach we will use is this:

Switch to 'Edit Selection' mode.

In the materials palette, switch the foreground colour to gradient mode.

Set up the desired gradient by clicking the large rectangle containing the foreground colour gradient and then, in the dialog that appears, set up the gradient like this (notice that the 'black-white' gradient has been chosen from the pull-down selection that is displayed when the little triangle is clicked):

If necessary, click the Edit gradient by clicking the Edit button then setting up the gradient colours like this (the custom colour has no importance because we are not using it here):

Flood fill the entire image with the gradient, using the Flood Fill tool . The gradient will appear not as white blending to black, but as red (at the top) blending to clear (at the bottom). Don't forget that in this 'Edit Selection' mode the red colour simply indicates which part of the picture is selected (the sky). It's not 'real red' and the colour will disappear and be replaced by marching ants as soon as you switch out of Edit Selection mode.

Switch out of Edit Selection mode. Note that the top part of the image is selected but the part is (probably) not. Note also that the marching ants give the false impression that there is a sharp line between what is selected and what is not whereas in Edit Selection mode we could see that there was no sharp line.

We now want to colourise the sky with the mauve colour. Problem: colourising doesn't work on areas that are very light or very dark so before we can colourise the sky we will have to darken it a bit. I usually discourage you from using the Brightness control (Adjust > Brightness and Contrast > Brightness/Contrast or just Shift-B) but this time it is the best and simplest control to use. As you use the control, notice that the sky is being darkened but not the water, since it is not selected.

Once the sky had been darkened a bit we can now colourise it with Adjust > Hue and Saturation > Colourise, setting the desired hue and saturation (choose any hue you like).