Technical data

Manipulating Images 33
The Adjustable Selection Tools flyout, a unique
PhotoPlus feature, offers 16 different variable
selection shapes, including pie, star, arrow, heart,
spiral, wave, and so on.
Here’s how the adjustable selection tools work.
We’ll use the regular polygon selection shape as
an example. Choose a tool from the flyout and drag out a shape on the
image. You can hold down the Shift key to constrain the selection's
aspect ratio.
The regular polygon appears as a blue outline with
two slider tracks bounding it. Each of the slider
tracks has a square handle, and when you move the
cursor on to the handle it will change to a small +
sign. As you drag the sliders, the shape’s
properties change. In the case of the polygon, one
slider varies the number of sides, while the other rotates the shape. As
with standard selections, you can move the whole selection around by
dragging from its center.
Once you’re satisfied with the selection, double-click in the center (just
as you did with the Crop tool) to create the selection marquee.
Using the Color Selection tool, you can select a region based on
the color similarity of adjacent pixels.
To make a selection in this way, choose the tool from the Tools toolbar
and then click on a starting pixel. This selects the pixel you clicked, and
any adjacent pixels that are similar in color, as measured by the
tolerance value shown on the Tool Properties tab. You can raise or
lower the tolerance setting to include more or fewer pixels.
PhotoPlus also offers a Text Selection tool that lets you create a text-
shaped selection region and vary its size or font (see the next chapter).
Modifying the selection
Once you've used a selection tool to select a region, you can carry out a
number of additional steps to fine-tune the selection before you actually
apply an effect or manipulation to the selected pixels.
Any time you're using one of the selection tools, the cursor over a
selected region changes to the Move Marquee cursor, which lets you
drag the marquee outline to reposition it. In this case you’re only
moving the selection outline—not the image content inside it. You'd use
the Move tool (see below) to drag the selection plus its image content.