The Dropper tool

The dropper tool is used to select any color from an image and place that color in the active foreground or active background color box. With your image on the screen, select the dropper tool and move it onto your image. As you move your dropper over the image, you will notice the foreground color changes to correspond to the color your dropper is over on your image. When you find the color on the image that you want to copy, just click the left mouse button for the color to go into the "foreground color window", or right click for the color to go into the "background color window". This is a wonderful tool for matching up colors to go with your image

The Flood tool

The flood tool fills an area on the image with, a color, pattern, or gradient. With your image on the screen, activate your control palette and then click on the flood fill tool. Select a color and choose your flood fill options from the control palette. The flood fill tool will fill an area type on the image as selected from the "match mode" drop down box on your control palette as well as a "color, pattern, or gradient" from the "fill style" drop down window.

For example, if you click on an area of your image that is white, it will only fill the white area and so on depending upon how you set your "match mode" options. For now, just know that the flood tool will cover any color that you click on the image and not effect the other colors on the image. This tool really comes in handy to quickly fill in a color fast, but you can only fill it over ONE color!

Now go ahead and experiment with this tool on your image, and play with the options on the control palette. You can make a brand new blank image to color on as well if you like! We will not be getting into to much detail here on all the flood fill options and how they work in PSP 101.

The Selection tools

Here we will be discussing three different tools that act in much the same way. The selection tool, magic wand tool, the freehand tool and the "marquee" that each makes.

A selection is an area of an image that you can edit apart from the rest of the image. For example, let's say that you have an image of a car and you want to pick out one of the tires. You would use one of the selection tools to do this. A selection is identified by a border of black and white dashes. This border of black and white dashes is called a marquee.

The selection tool has four different options available. The elliptical, circle, square, and rectangle selections that you can select at the control palette when the tool is in use.

The magic wand will select and make a marquee around a particular color. This can be very useful to edit a certain color area such as painting that marquee section only.

Then we have the freehand selection tool. This tool also has options on the control panel. The three options here are irregular shaped borders, point to point straight borders, and borders from edges between contrasting color or light.

This may all seem a little confusing, but that's ok because we will not be going into detail on this in PSP 101. My purpose here was just to get you familiar with them.

Now you get to experiment again (Oh Boy)! We are going to make a selection and cut it out of an image and then paste the image you just cut back onto the screen. So go ahead and put any image on your PSP screen. Click on the rectangle selection tool. Your pointer should look like cross hairs with a little box next to it. Now click on an upper location on your image and hold down the left mouse button and drag down and over. To start over, just right click on your mouse and the marquee disappears. When you have the selection in place, go to the scissors (cut button) and click. Now you are left with an image with a piece cut out of it. Scary huh! But not to worry! Now close the image and do NOT save changes. Whew told you it would be ok! By not choosing to save the changes your image was not changed. Now click on the paste button (clipboard icon on the task bar). Now you can see the piece of the image that you cut out. Neat huh!

You can now edit this as an individual image and "save as" just like you would any other image. Try this same thing using some of the other options in the control palette while using this tool. Play around with it and also try the magic wand and the freehand tool.

Now go to File, Preferences, Customize Toolbar and in the left hand window (available buttons) scroll down until you find the "Invert Selection" and highlight it. Click the "Add" button and the "Invert Selection" button is now added to your toolbar next to the arrow and question mark icon. Close Customize window menu.

Let's now try another useful technique using the rectangle selection tool. What we want to do here is make a colored border or frame around the image. With an image on the screen that is either a square or a rectangular image, drag a selection leaving an edge around the border of the image, so that when your selection is done there is a space between where the selection starts and the edge of the image.

Click on your paint brush and select a color. Now click on the image and hold down either mouse button to paint the frame on the picture. You will notice that the paint was only applied to the inside portion of the marquee. Now click on on the undo icon and the color you just applied is erased. Click on the invert selection icon that you just added to your toolbar. Apply the paint again. This time the paint is only applied to the outside part of the marquee, thus making a frame color. Clicking on the "Invert icon" reverses the selection. The part of the image that did not accept any paint is called the "Mask". Kind of like masking off something you are going to paint in real life so that you don't get paint on that area.

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