Gimp Lesson 6 | Using Selection Tools

welcome to another tutorial in this video we'll be learning about the different selection tools we have available in for selecting certain areas of our image and creating a custom selection that we can then apply changes to so this is common if we want to only apply changes in here like you race for example it'll only erase to wherever we have selected any of our brushes will only be drawn in this selection this is also pretty common for doing something like a color effect where you'll select just a certain area and we can go to like hue and saturation and change the hue of whatever selected in that area also what you'll do a lot is you'll do a rectangular selection like this and then you can go to image crop to selection and sort of cut out or you could get a really tight shot in here of just these strawberries and we can go to crop a selection and then you'll just have this image we could then export or do something to so let me do ctrl Z and undo all of this and let's start from the very beginning learning how to use these selection tools the first tool we're going to look at is the rectangular Select tool R is the shortcut key to get into that tool and that just lets us draw a rectangle or a square to draw it we just left we hold down the left mouse button and then unhold it to create the selection once it's created we can change it by hovering to the top and changing how tall it is either at the top or the bottom and I'm just left clicking and holding to change that again that only appears when you get close towards the edge sort of those handles will appear for doing that you can go to the corner and change the corners as well and so the bottom left-hand corner is now fixed and the other two are changed here if I click on the left one the bottom right-hand corner is fixed and everything else has changed so you can use these methods to sort of select the part of the image you want with a rectangular selection if we want to move the entire selection around we can use the Move tool so we click on the move tool by default I believe it's set to moving the layer you have the entire layer so it's going to kind of move our image and we see this transparency in the background I'm gonna hit control Z to get it back because what I want to do to move the selection we see under the settings for move it have it has an option for moving just the selection so I'll left click on that and now when I move this around it'll move my selection and not my image so I can move this down to the part of the image I want and maybe I'll just go to image crop to selection to get that nice selected area so now we can either work on our image just having the whole thing selected if you notice the whole part is still selected right now we can see these little black and white lines moving around the outside and that shows us everything is selected which means any tools that we use right now we're going to apply to the entire image but if we only wanted to select a certain area like the strawberry we might use this next tool which is the ellipse select tool it's going to let us draw an ellipse or a circle similar to the rectangular tool we just left click and hold and whatever selection we draw it draws a new selection every time so if we want to apply some smudges to just this part of the strawberry we select this we can come over and resize the circle similar to we did like how we did with the rectangle and then we can come and grab the smudge tool and now only smudging is going to happen within our selected area and nothing outside will be affected I mean it ctrl Z to undo those changes if we want to select multiple strawberries or multiple parts of our image we can grab this tool any of these tools have these options and under mode just like we changed with the Move mode there's also this ellipse select mode right now it says replace the current selection but we could also go add to current selection when we're in this mode anything we draw will get added to it and create sort of this different shape I can create like a snowman shape here but then we have this part selected over here as well so I could select every strawberry individually like this and then we have a nice sort of selection of just our strawberries there's also part of the mode that lets us subtract from the current selection so if I didn't want if I wanted to change this I just kind of draw and subtract this out this isn't necessarily the best way to do this but it is a method of doing it and if you're selecting a kind of a circular object it can be kind of nice like this bucket here we can select this and sort of cut out part everything that's not within this selection so that's just a method for doing this election we hit enter and we can have that be our total selection and then anything that we apply within here is going to be only applied to that selected area the next tool we'll look at is the freehand selection tool this lets us let click with our mouse to create these points and we can create any type of custom shape we want when we get to the end we'll just click on the very last point and then we can come in here and adjust by left clicking and holding and adjust these to get just the shape that we want when we think we have it right we'll hit enter and that becomes our selected area we can then use any tool that we want to to apply changes only within the selected area and nothing outside will be affected I want to also bring your attention to the different options on these tools we have this feathered edge and what the feathering helps you do is if you're ever doing something maybe we draw a circle here just to show this if we grab a brush and right now we just fill the whole thing in with black we see it has a very hard edge but if we turn on feathering so I'll grab the ellipse tool again and we'll check this feather edges what feather edges does is create a softer edge around the selected area so now if we grab the brush tool and fill this in we see the edges are much softer we don't have a hard edge like we did on this one so if I go to select I can right click and go to select all so now we see without the selection on these we have a soft edge here a feathered edge on this selection and no feather on this one so the feather can kind of help you merge in and make it look more natural without a hard edge on it and again that's feathering and it's a good idea to go through and play with the different options anti-aliasing also helps smooth the edges out around your selected area when you have something selected as well we can change the position of a selection here by just manually if we know where we want it to be on the pixels we can change the size of it this way as well and so there's some really good options we can play with under the properties of each different selection method we control Z and get back another selection method I want to show is this similar to the freehand selection we're gonna skip a few this is the scissor selection and it does similar to freehand only it's more intelligent so we just left-click and we can come over here and left-click again and it's gonna try and estimate where we want what part of the object we want to follow it didn't do a great job in this case but it'll kind of try to follow some of the lines around and then we can always come in here and re-click an add one in to get it exactly where we want and again we hit the enter key and now we have this part of the image selected we could do something like ctrl C on the keyboard to copy this and then we can get if we were in a new document we can go control V and paste just that part of the image but we see it is kind of jagged because we didn't have a feather applied so we might want to apply a feather to that instead I'm gonna close out of this or we could make a change to it we can just do some adjusting in here if we did try to crop if we went to image crop to selection just be aware it's gonna always crop a square it's not going to cut it out to cut it out we'd want you to use something under edit so we can right click and go to edit and we can do cut we can actually cut this and remove it and have a blank space in there we can right click and go to edit we can go fill with so we can fill with the foreground color similar to using the bucket tool there's lots of different options and we'll play with more of that in the future these other ones if I'm going to go to select and go to all these other ones here we have and your icons may look different we have the fuzzy select and the select by color they're gonna kind of behave similar in this one select by color does what you might expect where if you select a certain color it selects everything within that color and so we can turn this threshold down over here to the left and then it will select much finer it really helps you have if you have a good solid color you're trying to select otherwise it's gonna try to grab more like it's getting this sort of greens and tans in the bucket and in the leaves the fuzzy select is going to help us get away from that problem turn down the threshold a little bit it's hard to tell with this example but it really is only if we our threshold right we can then select just a certain area and just make changes to just those leaves or just these parts of the strawberries but again it's not perfect like we had there certain pixels are going to select different shaded areas especially gradients and shading so it may or may not work depending on the image you're using anyway that's some of the different selection methods you can play with we'll touch more on these ones they're a little bit more advanced so we'll touch more on using the threshold and playing with some of these in the future there's also ways we can combine different ones but just be aware of the selection mode is really important and if you do get on the mode one common mistake is that if you go to cut something out and you cut the whole thing out and then you forget you were in that mode and you go to draw a selection it won't let you it just gives you this symbol you can always look for cues down at the bottom if something's not working it tells us cannot subtract from an empty selection it's because we're on the subtraction mode right now one thing I like to do is just stay in this mode here the replaced current selection mode and then use the shortcut keys we can hover over and learn those shift and control so if in this mode we draw and we draw again it replaces our selection holding shift we can add to that without having to go and change the mode so we can add to our selection and holding ctrl we can subtract to that and that works with all these different ones we can do freehand hold shift and add in a new part and hit enter so we can add in different parts if we want to if we can freehand draw in these and then we could freehand draw out some of the selection as well so it can be really handy so learn those shortcut keys shift and control is going to avoid some confusion in this mode we'll go ahead and play with some of these different selection methods it may not be clear right now how powerful this is but as we start using more of the color tools and some of the different filters it's going to be really powerful and understanding a good foundation understanding how selection works is going to help you avoid a lot of confusion and frustration in the future so go ahead and leave your question in the comments below if you have any and I look forward to catching you in the next you

Channel: TJ FREE

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Id: Z2w_IFU_He4

Length: 11min 15sec (675 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 10 2019