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Adobe Fireworks CS3 Tutorials
Selecting/Transforming/Organizing Objects / Selecting Pixels
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Subtitles of the Movie (Adobe Fireworks CS3 / Selecting/Transforming/Organizing Objects / Selecting Pixels)
The Pixel selection tools that you'll find here in the bitmap section of the Tools panel enable you to draw selection marquees that define the area of selected pixels. For example, here I have the Rectangular marquee, underneath that I have the Oval marquee. If I take the Rectangular marquee and draw a rectangular marquee on my stage, I can then manipulate, move, add to this, or base another selection on this selection. I can also edit the pixels inside the selection, apply filters to the pixels, or erase pixels without affecting the pixels beyond the selection. That's really the key here, is if you want to isolate your editing to let's say this wine glass. I can for example, take the eraser tool, and notice that I'm erasing and I'm only erasing those pixels within that marquee. Likewise, I can paint, and I'm only affecting the pixels within that marquee. You can even apply filters. Let's go ahead and blur just that section within the marquee. Let's go ahead and add more blur, so you can really see the difference. That's actually not very obvious. Let's add some noise. That'll be obvious. Notice that I'm only adding Noise within that marquee. So you can edit pixels in a bitmap over an entire canvas without selecting anything, or you can select one of the Selection tools here, draw a selection on that canvas, and limit, or constrain, your editing to a particular area of the image in this way. The bitmap Selection tools are going to take you a little bit more time to master and learn than the regular vector Selection tools up here that I covered in the previous movie. Although the Marquee tool is pretty straightforward; it selects a rectangular area of pixels in an image. The Oval Marquee tool selects an elliptical area of pixels in an image. Notice that I can also delete portions of my pixels underneath that selection. Let's edit, Undo that. The Lasso tool, adjacent to the Oval and Rectangular Marquee tools, is probably one of those tools that does take some practice to master. The Lasso tool selects a Free form area of pixels in an image, and usually the way you'll use this is zoom way in to that image. You can press the Escape key to delete that selection, and then zoom in, take the Lasso tool, and then very carefully draw a selection around the bottle. Where it gets a little bit tricky, is you can use keyboard combinations with the Lasso tool to refine your selections. For example, generally I'll do a rough selection, and then I'll hold down the Alt key, or the Shift key to add or remove portions of that selection. Notice that I'm holding down the Shift key, and you can see perhaps right there a plus sign next to the Lasso icon, my cursor. You can use this tool to add additional parts to that selection that I maybe missed in my first pass through. Now you can see that I have got too much selection over here, so I can hold down the Alt key and notice that now my cursor has a negative sign, and now I can remove parts of those selections. So by using these two tools, and zooming in, even with a shaky hand I can really refine my selection there. Notice that the way this works is that when I'm adding selection I want to start in an area that's already selected, move into an unselected area, and then end anywhere out here within the selection and let go of my mouse, and now I have a nice accurate selection there. So let's go ahead and demonstrate this a little bit further by zooming into this area that is over-selected. Take my Lasso tool, hold down the Alt key, start anywhere out here where it's not selected, move into an area of selection, and then end anywhere out here that's not selected, and now I have a nice, pretty good, accurate selection there. Sometimes what I do is I'll press the Delete key to see exactly how I'm doing with my selection, Undo it and then I can tell that I'm missing some pixels over here, so then I just hold down the Shift key here and add more to that selection. Actually I deselected that selection so I want to go back and Undo, and there's my selection back. Press the Delete key, you can see that I still have it selected. Let's try that again. Hold down the Shift key and then add that selection back, like so. So let me go ahead and double-click on the magnifying glass to bring my bitmap image to 100 percent, press the Escape key to remove that selection. Now I have the Polygon lasso tool. This selects a straight-edged free-form selection of pixels, so if you have rectangular or straight-edged objects like this ice-bowl here for the Champaign, this is a good way to get an initial, pretty accurate selection. And notice that it's kind of snapping to the edges there, too, so I can use this tool; I'm double-clicking at the end there to end that selection, so I can use this tool to get a pretty good approximation of my selection, and then zoom in and use the Lasso tool to fine tune that selection. The Magic Wand is probably the most complicated tool of all. It selects an area of similarly colored pixels in an image and notice down here in the Properties Inspector you have a Tolerance setting. If you set the tolerance all the way up to 256 it selects the entire image. If you select 1, which is the lowest number, it only selects one color there, that's just one color, so normally what you'll do is set a moderate value, like 35 and test out. Let's say I want to just select that ice bucket there, and I'm a little bit close, but not quite, so I'll raise this from 34 to maybe 39, and click on it again. You can also hold down the Shift key like you did with the Lasso tool and increase your selection. That's too much there, so with the Lasso tool selected, click once. I have some of the picture selected, hold the Shift key down, and now I have more of that picture selected, and I can continue to hold down the Shift key and click with my Magic Wand to increase the selection. Also, I can increase the Tolerance. Let's increase this to 60, press Escape to delete that current selection, and now notice that I have too much, so 60 is too high, so you just, through a trial and error process, you can get the tolerance level that best matches the color selection that you need to select one individual object in your bitmap image. Let me now move on to the next movie and demonstrate how to transform and distort selected objects, and the selections themselves.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Adobe Fireworks CS3 |
| Author: | James Gonzalez |
| SKU: | 33836 |
| ISBN: | 1-934743-42-9 |
| Release Date: | 2008-01-25 |
| Duration: | 8.5 hrs / 93 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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