A SELECT Few Pixels...
An important notion in almost all graphics programs is selection. The ability to isolate and select areas or objects is essential. Let's looks at some selection tools. They are located at the top of the Tool palette (Figure 10). Choose the Rectangular Marquee tool. Click and hold anywhere in our document. Drag the cursor down and to the right. Release the mouse button. The result is that we've defined a selection area. Currently, the only part our document that we can effect is inside the selection area. With a selection area defined, go back to the three tools we looked at earlier and see how they all function with these new confines. Make sure you define new colors. Let's go back to the Rectangular Marquee tool and define a new selection area as we did before. This time, however, as you click and drag hold the Shift key on your keyboard. The result is that the selection area is constrained to square dimensions. This is very handy and will be true with many of the tools we'll see in the future. Conclusion
In this tutorial we examined some basic functions of the Tools palette. Below is a graphic of all the tools available (Figure 11). If you're interested in seeing how a tool functions, I suggest you look through the Help files in the text-menu. |