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Pastimes : Digital Photography
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To: Bill Ulrich who wrote (4298)12/29/2002 4:12:33 PM
From: Thomas Mercer-Hursh  Read Replies (2) of 21654
 
1. Outline a desired area of the background layer, using the selection tool of your choice.

When you say "outline" area you speaking of the kind of filled in area mask one gets with magic wand or lasso?

3. Anytime you need to retrieve that selection area, it's just one click away. ... "ctrl-click any area" of the *mask thumbnail* (white or black). ...

You may want to retrieve that selection area for a variety of reasons: 1) to copy the pixels of that area from another layer (make sure you've highlighted the layer you want to copy). 2. Make another mask using the same area.

4. Paste into a new layer.

From the description alone I was a bit fuzzy on the mechanics here, but a little fooling around with an actual image and I think I get it.

As for the issue of making the selection in the first place, my experience thus far is that the magic wand is sometimes just that, i.e., magic, but that there are a lot of situations where I find that having the tolerance low enough for it to not wander past the edge also means that limited amounts of the total desired area are marked with each click and it can take a lot of fussiness to clean out all the little islands. Lasso seems to be a bit more workable in those cases because the cleanup is pretty straightforward, but one loses the natural edge detection ... leaving me wishing I had gotten off my duff and bought a graphics tablet so I would have better control.

Any words of wisdom in that department, i.e., creating the mask?

I think I have a bit better understanding of how to play with the layers now, thanks. How much better will remain to be seen when I try the next problem photo.
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