GIMP 2.10: Selection Areas Advanced In-depth Tutorial

[Music] [Music] hello and welcome to yet another tutorial by Davies media design my name is Michael Davies and in today's tutorial I'm gonna be talking to you guys about selection areas this is the advanced tutorial for selection areas I did a basics version prior to this tutorial so check that out if you haven't already so essentially this is part 2 of 2 and of course as always I'll be using the latest version again for this tutorial two point ten point eight which is the latest version at the time of this recording but of course before we get into all that I want to direct you guys over to my website at Davies media design.com as always we have tons of give video and text tutorials on here so definitely check those out you can also enroll in my 2.10 photo editing course from beginner to pro photo retoucher on udemy and of course I'll include a discount link to that in the description and you could support our channel and help us grow by becoming a patron on patreon and I'll include a link to this as well as all the relevant links from this tutorial in the description of the video so here is one of the photos I'll be using for today's tutorial I downloaded this for free from pixabay of course I'll include a link to this and the other photo I'll be using this tutorial so here I have open this is again two point ten point eight so I did an introduction or the basics for selection areas in my last tutorial as I mentioned so one of the first things I said in that tutorial was that selection areas in their simplest form can be thought of as containers that isolate parts of an image for editing so I didn't get too deep into that concept just because I didn't want to get too advanced for that basics tutorial but actually in a more complex sense selection areas are actually very similar to a channel such as the red green blue or alpha channels with each pixel associated with a selection area containing a value between 0 and 255 so let me grab my rectangle select tool again and draw my selection area and I mentioned in that first tutorial that this is called the contour line right here and I said that everything outside the contour line is not selected and everything inside the contour line is selected it's actually a bit more complex than that yes usually everything in here is fully selected and everything outside here is unselected but as I just mentioned there are actually values between 0 and 255 for areas that are partially selected so a pixel with a value of zero as it relates to a selection area will be a pixel that is unselected and right now that is everything outside my selection area on the other hand that pixel with a value of 255 is fully selected again that's everything inside the selection area right now but there are pixels with the value between 0 and 255 and these are pixels that are partially selected and we're going to be going through that a little bit in this tutorial and I'll show you a few examples of that and again from a technical sense contour lines don't just separate pixels that are fully selected or fully unselected they actually technically separate pixels that are more than half selected from pixels that are less than half selected so those are pixels with around a value of 127 and below those are going to be pixels that are outside the contour lines and then pixels with the value of around 128 and above are gonna be pixels inside the contour lines from a technical standpoint so going back to selections in their simplest form when you draw a selection area like this one and you just draw it in the default settings so down here under the rectangle select tool options I've got all the defaults really set up here if not you can always come over here and click to reset to the default value so let's do that right there and then let me just draw this selection area again so the default doesn't have the highlight option checked let me just check that for the sake of demonstration but everything else is set to the default values so this is going to draw a selection area with sharp edges and by that I mean there's no partial selection going on around the contour lines here so everything again inside is fully selected everything outside is unselected and I want to demonstrate this using what's called the quick mask this is a tool that I demonstrated in a few other tutorials but if I come over here and click this option right here it's going to toggle my quick mask on or off so here we have our quick mask on and you can see here that the edges of this are crisp the sharp if I hold ctrl and zoom in you'll see there is a strict edge here a strict boundary between what is unselected which is going to be everything that is overlaid in red and what is selected which is everything that does not have the red overlay so the quick mask is a great way to demonstrate this concept of partial transparency see let me come over here and turn the quickmask off if I hit ctrl I an invert my selection area and then toggle that quick mask on again you'll see it's going to switch which area has the red overlay so again all of this stuff right here has a pixel value of 255 because it is fully selected and everything inside the red here has a value of zero because it is fully unselected so let me toggle that quick mask off again and I'll hit control I by the way you can hit shift Q to toggle the quick mask on and off as well that's the shortcut key for the quick mask so let me draw a selection area with partial transparency so I'll hit control shift a so this time before I draw my selection area I'm going to check the feather edges option and what this does is it creates a transition along the contour line from a fully selected area to an unselected area and the larger the radius you set right here the longer the transition will take so let's set a radius of let's go with the round 50 right now and I just drag the slider here so it's not exact but now I'm going to draw my rectangle select tool and right now the only way you could really tell that the feathered edges option is working is that it has rounded corners right here but let me hold ctrl and zoom out that's not really fully giving us the big picture of what's happening here so let me come over here and toggle the quick mask on again this time you can see the quick mask does not have those sharp edges or does not have a hard edge where that selection area or the contour lines are separating the fully selected areas from the unselected areas so if I hold ctrl and zoom in you can see now that there is some partial transparency going on here and that is denoted by the red overlay sort of losing its opacity right here so it goes from fully opaque in terms of how opaque this overlay is to full transparency here in revealing just the normal image so the feathered edges here are partial transparency and if I toggle that quick mask on again you could see that the quick mask actually is happening or the feathering is actually happening along this contour line so it's going to start around right here and that is where this is fully unselected and then this is all partial transparency right here and this is where it starts to become fully selected again so I'll hit shift Q to hoggle that and you guys can see that going on here and then I'm gonna come up here towards the top and hit shift Q again and you can see also right here there is that feathering of the edges happening or that partial transparency so I hit shift Q again and we'll go back to our selection area I'll hold ctrl and use my mouse wheel to zoom out so one quick note here if I hold ctrl shift a to select none and I uncheck the feathered edges option and then I draw this rectangle first if I come over here and then check the feathered options after the fact it's not going to feather the selection here so if I toggle my quick mask on you'll see even though I have feathered edges checked we still have that sharp edge here so the feathered edges option is only going to work if you check that before you draw the rectangle although there is a way to feather the edges after the fact so let me turn my quick mask off again so if I've drawn my selection area already and I want to feather this after the fact I can go to select feather and now I could choose how much I want to feather this by so in this case I can go with 50 pixels and I'll click OK and now you'll see those rounded corners again and then if I hit shift Q on my keyboard you'll see now we have that feathering going on here the partial transparency or the fully unselected areas transitioning into the fully selected areas I'll hit shift Q again and toggle that quick mask off on the other hand if I want to sharpen this back up after I feathered it I can go to select sharpen and what that'll do is it'll sharpen my edges back it'll turn off the feathered edges so if I hit shift Q you can see now we have sharp edges here one thing you'll notice though is that this will come with rounded corners now it's not going to sharpen this back up and create a sharp rectangle here or a perfect rectangle it's going to create a rectangle with rounded corners instead but it will have the sharp edges here now instead of having that feathering going on so I'll hit shift Q again to turn off the quick mask and I'll hit ctrl shift a to deselect that and I'll hold ctrl in my mouse wheel to zoom out alright so next let's say we want to create areas of partial transparency that are the entire selection area that we drew so let me come over here to my other image and I'm just going to click and drag this and I'm going to release my mouse right here and that's going to drop this image on their image then I'm going to just let's use the unified transform tool and I'm going to use this to scale my image down and then also move this into place and I'm just going to loosely add this to our photo here all right so now we have our second image in here let's say for whatever reason we want to select part of this image and then we want to turn that selection area into partial transparency so I'll start by coming over here to one of my selection tools which is the lasso tool and for this example I'm going to pretty loosely draw a lasso around this girl I'm not gonna take my time or anything so it might look a little sloppy but let's say I draw this lasso here I'll connect the ends hit the enter key so now we have our selection area again let's say I want to create partial transparency within this selection area what I can do is I can go to select float and that is going to put our selection area on its own floating selection layer so let me hide our layer that we dropped our image on to there the dropped buffer layer so now we have this floating selection layer here now what I can do is I can come over here to the opacity slider and I could slide this opacity around I can't see the selection area right now but what I can do is I can click on this floating selection layer and I can either anchor it which is going to apply the floating selection to the layer below or I can put this on its own new layer which is what I'm gonna do so I'll click on this new layer and that will add this floating selection area to its own layer and then you can see it's also given this layer the opacity that we set while we were dragging the opacity slider so basically now I can just drag this opacity around and that is going to give our selection area some partial transparency there one thing you'll note though is that even though we did give the selection area partial transparency it's actually happening on its own layer so it's not technically happening inside of our selection area but we were able to give that selection area partial transparency by floating it onto its own floating selection area and then adding that new floating selection area to its own layer and let me just go back and show you the anchoring options so if I click on this and then I hit anchor basically what that's going to do is it's going to force that selection area onto the layer below which was that dropped buffer layer where we originally brought this image in so it's going to add that cutout area back into the area we cut it out from in the original image so it does give that selection area partial transparency and then just sort of inserts it back into the area but you could see our selection area is gone now after we've anchored this on to its original layer and let me point out one other thing with this technique here when you're trying to cut out a selection area and give it partial transparency and that is let me go ahead and delete this layer here so I've got our original girl layer the girl kayaking on the water here so let me perform the same task with her and she doesn't have another image below her so let's see what happens when I cut this out I'll hit the enter key I'll go to select float and then I'll put that selection on its own floating layer let me add that to a new layer so now here we have our selection area that we cut out we can give it partial transparency but you'll see that below this instead of there being transparency there's a color this color is actually our background color that we have set right here so if I hide this you can see that these two colors are the same the reason this is happening is because I have not added an alpha channel to this image right here so basically I do not have a layer of transparency set for this image so instead of having transparency below this it's showing up as a background color let me hit control Z and just back this up to before we created the selection so before I cut the selection out what I want to do is right click on here go to add alpha Channel that'll add transparency to this now I can go to select float and I will put that floating selection object onto its own layer and then I'll decrease the opacity and now you'll see we get that checkerboard pattern which denotes transparency so that's just a quick note there and I'll hit control Z and just back up so I showed you guys how to cut out an object with a selection area using the Select float option but if you wanted to cut out an object using a more non-destructive way what you could do is you could use a layer mask instead so I can come over here right click and go to add layer mask and under initialize layer mask - I could check the selection option and then when I click Add you'll see that that is going to add a layer mask to my image which is going to mask everything outside of the selection area and only keep what's inside the selection area which is our cutout shape so now we could add this to another image so for example I can click and drag this over here and drop it and that is just going to drop our image on here as a cutout but the cool thing about a layer mask and with it being non-destructive is I can come over here right click and I can either disable this layer mask which is going to turn the layer mask off temporarily or if I just wanted to revert this back to the original image I could right click on here and go to delete layer mask and that'll just get rid of the layer mask entirely and revert that back to our original image so I can also grow or shrink the selection area so if I wanted to make the selection area a little bit larger I go to select grow and here it allows you to grow the selection area by however much you want and you can also change the units here so I'll just grow this by let's say 25 pixels and I'll click OK so that has gone ahead and grown our selection area I can also shrink this so I can go to select shrink and I'll shrink this by 50 and we'll keep this set to pixels and I'll click OK so now that is shrunk our selection area so that's just a pretty useful tool when I want to create effects with our selection area or if maybe you drew a selection area that's maybe a little bit too small or a little bit too large then you can adjust the size of that selection area after you've drawn it using those grow or shrink options so I'll hit ctrl shift a to deselect that and before I move on from the shrink and grow features let me just come over here to my rectangle select tool I'm just gonna draw another selection here with my rectangle and I have the feather edges option checked over here so that's why these are rounded but if I hit ctrl I on my keyboard and invert my selection area and then I come over here to select grow it's not going to grow the selection area right here because this is not what our selection area is anymore it's what's going on outside so everything in between our two sets of marching ants that's what's selected so when I grow my selection area it's actually going to shrink this rectangle inside here so this is going to move inward and the reason for that is because this area right here is the area that's growing so that causes this selection area inside here to shrink so I'll just let's grow this by 50 pixels and click OK so you'll see that will shrink this area right here and the reason being that this selection area right here is the area that's growing and then on the their hand if I go to select shrink again it's not going to shrink this area it's going to shrink this area so it's going to make this middle area larger so I'll click OK and you'll see it also shrunk the outside edges here so this area shrunk in and this area in the middle shrunk in creating this smaller selection area here so hey control shift a to deselect that and you guys will remember from my last tutorial that control a is the shortcut key for select all in the marching ants going around the outside border of my image indicate that everything within this image right now is selected and let me just come over here and I'm going to change the name of this to border because I'm going to demonstrate another feature of these selection areas and that is that you can create a border from your selection areas and I'll do that by going to select border and right here it's going to ask me to create a border style so I'm gonna set this to let's go with 25 pixels and I'll set my border style here to smooth there's a few other options in here including hard and feathered and I'm going to keep this selected areas continue outside the image unchecked and I'll click OK and what that has done is its created a border from my selection area so remember we went to select all and because the entire outside border of our image had the marching ants or the selection area what it did was it created another selection area 25 pixels outside of that first selection area and what that did is created a border so now we have a cool border going around the outside of my image and I can fill this in with the color so if I grab my bucket fill tool let me just hit the D key on my keyboard that's going to reset my colors to black and white and then I'm just going to fill this in with my foreground color which is black and that was on my border layer and so now we have a black border going around our image I'll hit ctrl shift a to select none and so there is our quick and easy border that we created using that select border effect so one last thing I want to demonstrate for you guys before I let you go is that there is something called the selection editor and you can access that by going to select selection editor and that'll pull your selection editor up here as a dockable dialog usually it'll show up over here under layers channels pads undo so show up right next to your undo history and what your selection editor does is it displays your selection area that you have drawn and that you're working on so if I come over here and I grab my rectangle select tool and I draw a rectangle and this one again still has the feathered edges this is going to display your selection area relative to the size of your entire composition so you can see that these two objects here relate to one another and you have a set of options down here for your selection area so you can come over here to select everything or select all you can deselect everything so this is going to unselect everything or basically go to select none so click on that to demonstrate and this isn't perfect sometimes it doesn't fully erase everything going on in here we'll hit control Z to bring that back up so you also have the invert selection option here and then you could save the selection to a channel you can also click the selection a path option and that is useful when you want to save your selection that you drew so let's say you drew this and you want to come back to it later you can click this option and that is going to save our selection shape to a path so if I come over here to my paths dialog and I unhide this path you'll see if I hit ctrl shift a our selection area has now been converted to a path so we can always come back later and convert that path back to a selection and then we have our selection area back again so that's useful when you've deselected your selection area but you want to come back and bring that selection area back up and use it for something else I'll just come over here and hide our paths and I'll come back over here to our selection area so that selection area that we created from our path does not have feathered edges as you could tell by the selection editor here and a quick note if you hold shift and click on that selection to path option you're going to get a bunch of advanced settings here that you can tweak or mess around with I'll try to get to a separate tutorial on what all of these settings do but I'll just say cancel for now just know if you shift-click on this you get a bunch of extra options and then the last option over here is to paint along the selection outline so if I click on that that gives you the option to stroke your selection so you could choose from the options here and it's going to use your foreground color over here if you choose solid color or it'll use whatever pattern you have currently selected I'll just go a solid color head stroke and then you'll see if I hit control shift egg that our selection outline now has a stroke going on I'll hit ctrl Z and ctrl Z again to delete that stroke and then I'll hit ctrl shift a to deselect that area and you'll see that the selection area over here has disappeared from our selection editor if I click on the selection editor it's actually going to select all so that's just another quick tidbit there about the selection editor I'm gonna hit ctrl shift a to deselect that and I'm gonna come over here and I'm just going to close that selection editor tab and come back over here to our layers tab so as I mentioned in the selection areas basics tutorial I'm not going to go over all of these selection tools in this tutorial because I do go over those tools in the to our basics tutorial that I have up on my channel so I do recommend you check that out if you want to know more about the selection tools but that's it for this tutorial hopefully you guys liked it if you did please subscribe to our channel at youtube.com slash Davies media design you can also visit my website at Davies media design.com you can enroll in our best-selling get photo editing course from beginner to pro photo retoucher on udemy 80 could support our channel and help us grow by becoming a patron on patreon and on clewd a link to that as well as all the relevant links from this tutorial in the description of the video so thanks for watching and we'll see you next time

Channel: Davies Media Design

Views: 12,325

Rating: 4.7986579 out of 5

Keywords: gimp, gimp tutorial, gimp for beginners, how to gimp, gimp graphic design, gimp photo editing, gimp 2018, GIMP 2.10, GIMP, basics, selection areas, selection tools, selections, GIMP 2.10.8, advanced selection areas, GIMP Advanced, GIMP expert, selection area

Id: KObjKFvGf-I

Length: 21min 35sec (1295 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 27 2018