Subtitles of the Movie

One of the interesting quirks in Painter versus Photoshop when it comes to making selections for flats is the Polygon Lasso Tool will only allow you to select whatever's on your screen. Let me show you what I mean. I'm going to go ahead and go to actual pixels here and then scroll up to this area. If I grab the Polygon Lasso Tool and I begin to create a complicated shape like so, very fantastic, useful tool for making this and as long as we're on screen, works great. However, if I start clicking and then I hold down the Spacebar to begin panning, I lose my selection and as a matter of fact, I'm left with this little bit of schmutz that I have to get off screen by sort of shaking it off screen like so. So this is not a good way of working. Well, the solution is to use the Pen Tool instead. The Pen Tool works exactly the same way as the Polygon Lasso Tool does and you can make very long selections, panning and doing whatever you need to do and then making those into a selection just like so. So that is definitely the better way to go and as a matter of fact, I've actually got a selection just like that that I made for the entire sky here so we'll be getting to that one in just a one second; however, we're going to go ahead and start by filling the entire canvas with just a solid color because that's the way you really want to go when you're starting with your flats. The next thing we're going to do is we're going to go to this shape, just grab one of the Path-Based Tools and we're going to load that as a selection. And now we're just going to grab something that's going to be a little bit more like that. Fill that, just like so and now we have ourself a nice sky separated from our foreground elements and this is a very nice thing. Now, what we want to do is carve away Scales' head from this background. What is going to be advantageous for us is to take advantage of this Tolerance Setting in the Paint Bucket. However, if we have a selection active, that's not going to work for us so let me show you what I mean. I'm going to go ahead and make a selection like so and this is going to be fairly sloppy but you'll get the idea of how to use the Polygon Lasso for this. OK, so that's a pretty quick Polygon Lasso selection. If I grab the Paint Bucket Tool in something like a yellow or something like that and I click here, see how it fills everything? That's not going to work for us. That is a real problem as far as using the Paint Bucket Tool. It ignores this Tolerance Setting if you have a selection active. However, if I Undo that and let's grab something like our Flatting Brush, right and what I'll do is I'll just boost up that size and just create a cut here like so and I'm going to ignore the fact that we went past that gray real quick. Now, if I deselect that selection and click with the Paint Bucket, you'll see now it doesn't go out into the gray and the reason why is because that Tolerance kicked in once we didn't have a selection anymore so if you have a selection, Tolerance in the Paint Bucket doesn't matter. If you don't have a selection, then the Tolerance in the Paint Bucket does matter. It's one of those interesting little quirks. So that said, probably the thing to do when you're working is to go ahead and make a selection, oops, let me go ahead, zoom in there and try that again. Alright. Grab our Flatting Brush, make sure it's set for Flatting Brush and just grab a color, something that will stand out sufficiently from the background and now as long as I paint here, notice how it won't go past that edge. So now I'm just going to paint that same selection that I just made like so and now if I grab the Paint Bucket Tool, Deselect and Fill like so. So this is the way that we would carve away and gradually whittle down so you know, I'll go ahead and do some more of this. So we'll do this, this little bit here. So I'm going to go ahead, grab the Magic Wand Tool, select this whole thing, grab our Flatting Tool, get a yellow and you know, don't worry about going out past the edges. It's one of those things where this is not going to be any kind of a problem. We can clean this up later. As a matter of fact, this is very much the standard working process, in Photoshop as well because in Photoshop you just use the Pencil Too, which is very much like the Flatting Tool here. I'm just going to Deselect, grab the Paint Bucket, Fill that in and move on to the next shape and we can keep carving down and down and down so don't feel as if, you know, it's going to be any kind of great tedious process. It really goes pretty quickly. Look at that though. There we go. And I'm going to go ahead and do the same thing just like so. This is the last one I do because no point in making you watch me do the same thing a million times over. And that's basically what flatting is. OK. Deselect those, Fill, Fill, Fill and there we go. The reason why I had to fill three times is because they weren't necessarily connected shapes. So that is flatting and as you can see here, once you've got some big shapes cut away using something like the Pen Tool, you can quickly and easily go with the Flatting Brush and the Paint Bucket Tool and just quickly carve things up and make things very, very simple and then of course once we have those things selected, we can select them at any point in time, just like so, so that we can paint on them, which is the whole point of this entire exercise to begin with.