

- Black dragon viewer how to edit objects update#
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Instant Alpha - No, Instant Alpha won’t make you leader of the pack. Let us know if you’ve found good uses for these tools, but if you’re just trying to remove a background from an image, the Instant Alpha tool is a better choice. Honestly, there aren’t that many uses for the Elliptical Selection tool, and both of the lasso tools are finicky, so we use them only occasionally. One technique we frequently employ is obscuring part of a screenshot by copying a chunk of its background color and pasting it over the part of the image we want to cover up. Once you have a copy, you can move and resize it to your heart’s content, although it will always be essentially rectangular in Preview’s eyes, no matter how irregular it was to start. Remember that you can also choose File > New from Clipboard to create a new file with the copied selection. Use Command-C to copy the selection, so you can paste a copy into this or another image. Press Delete to remove it from the image, leaving a hole.Choose Edit > Invert Selection (Command-Shift-I) to select everything other than what you just selected.Once you’ve selected something with one of these tools, you have a few options: Oddly, youĬan’t move a Smart Lasso selection afterwards with the pointer, but you can nudge it with the arrow keys. It will take some experimentation to get the desired results. When you drag, you see a thick red line instead of a thin white line - draw that around the object you want to select and Preview tries to construct the selection intelligently. For such situations, Preview offers the Smart Lasso tool, which offers some assistance. But in a photograph, for instance, you’re unlikely to be so lucky. The Lasso Selection tool works well when the irregularly shaped object you want is well separated from other parts of the image. Once you’ve finished making a selection, you can drag the selection - not the underlying image, but the dashed line selection - around with the pointer, or nudge it with the arrow keys. Selection has to form a closed shape, if you don’t close it yourself by ending your drawing back on the starting point, the selection closes itself with a straight line. The hard part of this is that you have to do it in a single click-and-drag motion. But with the Lasso Selection tool, you can hand-draw a selection around any object. The Rectangular Selection and Elliptical Selection tools fall down when you need to select an irregularly shaped object or portion of a graphic. The next selection tool is Lasso Selection, which Bill Atkinson first invented for MacPaint in 1983. The handles attached to the selection ellipse itself adjust one dimension at a time, whereas those on the corners of the rectangle that encloses the ellipse can adjust two dimensions at once. As with the Rectangular Selection tool and the shape tools, you can press Option while making the original selection to size it from the center, and pressing Shift gives you a perfect circle.Īfter dragging out an elliptical selection, you get the usual drag handles. It works just like the Rectangular Selection tool, except that it selects elliptical rather than rectangular areas.

The selection tools are accessed via the first button at the left.Įlliptical Selection is the second choice on the selection tools pop-up menu. You find them in the Markup Toolbar, which you display by choosing View > Show Markup Toolbar (Command-Shift-A). However, when working with images, several other selection tools offer more variety and control. This week, we’ll go deeper with some advanced editing techniques, and double back for a few tidbits we skipped in previous articles.Īdvanced Selection Tools for Images - In “ The Power of Preview: Cropping and Resizing Images,” we discussed using the Rectangular Selection tool. In “ The Power of Preview: Cropping and Resizing Images” (18 March 2016) and “ The Power of Preview: Annotating Documents and Images” (2 April 2016), we explored editing and annotation tasks with Preview, OS X’s built-in document and image powerhouse.
Black dragon viewer how to edit objects series#
Black dragon viewer how to edit objects update#
#1585: macOS 12 Monterey and iOS 15.1 released, 1Password secure password sharing, choosing the right chart in Numbers, Apple device updates in Software Update.
Black dragon viewer how to edit objects windows#
