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Working with Selections
Corel Painter provides a variety of tools and commands for creating selections in a document. Each time you create a new selection, Corel Painter deactivates the old one.
You can use selections in several ways:
- To constrain brush strokes. You can protect the area inside or outside the selection.
- To isolate an area of the canvas for applying an image effect. Corel Painter applies the effect only to the selection. You can also set different levels of protection within a selection to create partial intensity of the effect.
- To choose the area of the canvas you want to cut or copy.
- To choose the area of the canvas that you want to move or copy to a new layer.
- To apply a brush stroke along a selection border.
You can save and reload selections. Saving a selection creates a channel. Loading a selection reactivates it on the canvas, where it controls your painting and image effects.
Corel Painter lets you combine selections in powerful ways. Refer to "Combining Selections Using Boolean Operations" for more information.
About Selection Types
There are two types of selections:
- Path-based selections are defined by a closed path. They provide two levels of selection-what's inside the path is selected, and what's outside is not. You can move path-based selections around, and scale and rotate them with the Selection Adjuster tool. Path-based selections offer some other advantages you'll learn about later.
- Pixel-based selections are defined at the pixel level. These selections can be moved, but they cannot be resized or rotated. They can be transformed into path-based selections.
Pixel-based selections provide 256 levels of protection to the canvas. Each pixel in the selection sets a level of protection for its corresponding color pixel in the RGB image. Opaque areas of the selection provide 100% protection and prevent brush strokes and effects from marking the canvas. Clear areas of the selection provide no protection and allow brush strokes and effects to mark the canvas. Where the selection is shaded, or semi-transparent, brush strokes and effects are partially applied. This lets you paint and apply effects with varying levels of intensity within a selection.
The method you use to create a selection determines its type. Selections created with the Rectangular Selection, Oval Selection, and Lasso tools, and selections converted from shapes, are path-based. Selections created with the Magic Wand tool or the Auto Select or Color Select command are pixel-based.
When you save a selection, it becomes a channel, which is pixel-based. When you load a channel to a selection, the selection is always pixel-based. A pixel-based selection can be converted to a path-based selection. For more information, refer to "Transforming Selections".
Selecting a Drawing Mode
The drawing mode determines whether the inside or outside of a selection is protected when you paint on an image.
To select a drawing mode
- Point to the Drawing Mode icon in the bottom-left corner of the document window, and hold down the mouse button.
- Choose one of the following buttons:
Draw Anywhere disables protection based on the selection-brush strokes are allowed anywhere on the canvas. The selection is still active for applying effects and using the Cut or Copy command.
Draw Outside protects the area inside the selection.
Draw Inside protects the area outside the selection, similar to using a stencil. Only the selected region accepts brush strokes.
Turning Selections On and Off
To turn off a selection
- You can also turn off a selection, or "deselect" it, by clicking outside the selection with the Oval Selection, Rectangular Selection, or Lasso tool.
To re-activate a selection
Hiding and Showing the Marquee
You can control display of the selection marquee.
To hide or show the selection marquee
Inverting the Selection
Inverting a selection switches the selection area. For example, if you have an image of a boat on the water and you've created a precise selection of the boat, you can select everything but the boat by inverting the selection.
In this image, the flower is selected.
After inverting the selection, everything but the flower is selected.
A pixel-based selection can have 256 values in it, like a grayscale image. Inverting a pixel-based selection is equivalent to the negative of a grayscale image. For example, a pixel that has 80% luminance will have 20% luminance when inverted.
To invert a selection
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