Subtitles of the Movie

This is a side of a frog you don't see too often and this little guy was hanging out outside my glass window in my office. And fortunately I had my digital camera. So, we'll go ahead and use him as our example as we talk about selecting pixels within Fireworks. If you've used a bitmap editing program in the past, you will find these tools to be very familiar. You can edit pixels over an entire canvas area, or you can choose one of the pixel editing or selection tools to constrain your editing to a particular part of an image. The first tool we are going to look at is the marquee tool. And we will select the rectangular marquee tool. And much like it sounds, this tool is used to select a rectangular area of pixels within an image. And you can see by our selection, we have a series of marching ants indicating what our selection is. If I hold down the shift key, I can constrain the selection to be a square. And as you notice when I make these various selections, the property inspector changes. And we have different styles and edges that we can apply to our selection. And we'll go through these in just a few moments. Let's take a look and another selection tool: the oval marquee tool. I will hit control+D to be release our previous selection. And with over oval marquee tool selected, I can now select oval or circular shaped areas of pixels within my image. And once again if I hold down the shift key, I can constrain this selection to be a perfect circle. The lasso tool selects a free form area of pixels within an image. I can just simply hold down my mouse button and move my mouse around. And when I release it, it will automatically close off my selection, and you can see the areas or the pixels that I've selected within my image. If I use the Alt button, it will create a series of points. I am simply clicking the mouse button in different areas, while I am continuing the hold down the Alt key. And you can see we have created a simple selection. The results of the polygon lasso tool: and this works in a similar fashion to the lasso tool when I was holding down the Alt key. Except this case, I can just click on the mouse and it is going to create individual points on my bitmap image. And I will go ahead and double click, and it will automatically close off my selection. The final pixel selection tool we are going to look at is the magic wand. And the magic wand selects an area of similar colored pixels in an image. And this is based on the tolerance level that we set within the property inspector. And you can see once I selected the magic wand, the property inspector changed with these new settings. I will go ahead and go with the setting of 25, and I will select this lightly colored green area. And you can see only a few pixels were selected, and this is based on the tolerance setting that we have here below. I will go ahead and remove that selection, and I will increase the tolerance to 90. And once again, I will select this lightly green colored area. And now you can see quite a few more pixels were selected since we've increased the tolerance in the color that will be selected. We can also change the edge from hard to anti-alias and feathered. Now, I will go ahead and go back to our marquee tools so that we can see this example a little bit easier. I will go ahead and make a rectangular selection. And one thing to keep in mind is that the pixel selection tools create marquees and other areas that define selected pixels. And once you have created a selection, you can manipulate it by moving it, adding to it or basing another selection on it. So you can combine multiple selections together. You can also edit the pixels inside the selection, apply filters to the pixels, or erase pixels without affecting the pixels beyond the selection. And you can also create floating sections of pixels that you can edit, move, cut, or copy. Let's take a look at the styles that we have. By default, it's set to normal. And normal let's you create a marquee in which the height and width are independent of each other. Fixed ratio constrains the height and width to defined ratios; and fixed size sets the height and width to a defined dimension. We can also adjust the edge of our selection. Hard creates a marquee selection with a defined edge. Anti-alias prevents jagged edges in the marquee selection. And feathered lets you soften the edge of the pixel selection, and you can see now we have a drop down menu which we can select that. Let's take a look and see what this looks like. I will go a head and delete this section. Fireworks also allows you to provide options to adjust the edge of the marquee. The first option by default is hard, and this creates a marquee selection with a defined edge. The next option is anti-alias. And this prevents jagged edges in the marquee selection. The third and final option is feather. And to use feather, you must deselect and then reselect this area, for the feather option to take place. Now I will go ahead and increase the size of this to 50 so it's a little more noticable. What I am going to do is select this area. And you can see now our selection has a curve to it, indicating the setting of 50 that I used here in the drop down menu. What I am going to do is hit the delete key so that we will feather this bitmap image from the white background into the image itself. And as you can see as I press the delete key, more and more the image is removed based on our feather. And the settings from the drop down menu. l feather this bitmap image from the white background into the image itself. And as you can see as I press the delete key, more and more the image is removed based on our feather. And the settings from the drop down menu.