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Pastimes : Digital Photography -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Thomas Mercer-Hursh who wrote (4299)	12/29/2002 5:33:30 PM
From: Bill Ulrich	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 21662

Yes, the "marching ants" outline. The selection border is animated like little ants. "When you say "outline" area you speaking of the kind of filled in area mask one gets with magic wand or lasso?" For your tree image that was dark in the center, try using the Marquee tool set in "Elliptical" mode. Draw an oval that approximates the area of darkness. Feather the selection (menu: "Select/Feather" shortcut: Ctrl-Alt-d ). Use a big feather — maybe 50 pixels at first. The resulting area may not look very similar to what you think the area should be. Don't worry about that right now. Click the "new adjustment layer" button from my earlier post. Select Levels, move the top right slider towards the middle. Click OK. Now you have a mask of that area and can re-adjust the levels to suit your taste. If the area mask doesn't seem quite right, you can use the airbrush or eraser to subtract from or add to the mask. (Use black paint, paint directly on the adjustment layer. You can see how the mask changes by observing the screen and/or the layer thumb). That's a workaround for using the Quickmask tool in PShop, which is what its name suggests — quick masks. "Any words of wisdom in that department, i.e., creating the mask?"

To: Thomas Mercer-Hursh who wrote (4299)	12/29/2002 5:33:58 PM
From: Bill Ulrich	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 21662

A graphics tablet will indeed help very much. If you're a perfectionist about selection areas (I am!), another reason to have PShop is the Path tool, not found in Elements. Its accuracy far exceeds every other selection tool in the program. It's faster to work with, too, once you get over the initial awkwardness of working w/ Bezier handles. No clean up issues that you run into with Magic Wand. "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."