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Well, the irony of yesterday was that in the
introduction we said that Photoshop was not really a painting program yet
we spent the rest of the day learning how to paint on our canvas.
Well, that is because you needed to learn the fundamentals
of Photoshop before you could move on to the more exciting features.
Today we will go into some of those more exciting features. In
particular, for the first half of the day we will work with "Selections".
Selections are areas within the canvas that you
set apart from the rest which you can apply special effects to or
other wise modify, copy, cut, flip, move, rotate or scale.
It is important
to understand that Photoshop is different from other programs in which you
select things. For example, consider your word processor. Most likely, when you
want to select a word, you double click on that word. Your word processor knows
to select the word because letters are isolate objects.
Photoshop does not have that
convenience. When you scan in a picture of a face, Photoshop has no way of discerning
between the eyes and the nose on that face. This is because images are pixel based
rather than object oriented. Photoshop can manipulate those pixels, but it cannot
intelligently differentiate between them in terms of the overall meaning
of the picture.
This is a good thing because otherwise, there would be little use
for you. Fortunately, you are needed to decide which pixels belong to which
meaningful part of a picture. For example, you might want to select a pair of
glasses on a face in order to change the color of the frame. Typical reasons to make
selections include
- Editing a portion of your canvas
- Creating a mask or layer
- Cropping
- Applying filters and special effects to portions of your image
To select a portion of your canvas, you will have to use one
of the selection tools that we will discuss more later. But all
selection tools do the same basic task, they draw an outline around some bit of your
canvas with a little flashy marquee that looks like a dashed line or a row of little
parading ants.
Once you have selected an area, you can manipulate that
area in many cool ways. We will do a lot of manipulation of
selections over today and tomorrow, so it is crucial that we get a
good sense of how to select areas.
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