Technical data

10 Getting Started
3 Making a selection
In any photo editing program, the selection
tools (see Chapter 3) are as significant as any
of the basic brush tools or commands. The
basic principle is simple: quite often you’ll
want to perform an operation on just a portion
of the image. The wide range of selection options in PhotoPlus lets you:
♦ Define just about any selection shape
♦ Modify the extent or properties of the selection
♦ Carry out various manipulations on the selected pixels, including
cut, copy, paste, rotate, adjust colors, etc.
Although the techniques for using each selection tool vary a bit, the end
result of making a selection is always the same: a portion of the image
has been roped off from the rest of the image. The boundary is visible as
a broken line or marquee around the selected region.
4 Foreground and background colors
At any given time, PhotoPlus allows you to work
with just two colors—a foreground color and a
background color. These are always visible as
two swatches on the Color tab. Electronic artists
expend much of their creative energy deciding which of the millions of
available colors should fill those two slots. The actual steps involved,
however, can be quite simple (see Chapter 4).
5 Layers
If you’re accustomed to thinking of
pictures as flat illustrations in books,
or photographic prints, the concept of
image layers may take some getting
used to. In a typical PhotoPlus image—for example, a photograph
you’ve scanned in, a new picture file you’ve just created, or a bitmap file
you’ve opened—there is one layer that behaves like a conventional “flat”
image. This is called the Background layer, and you can think of it as
having paint overlaid on an opaque, solid color surface.