We will be covering a few basics about Selections, however the primary goal is to have you become familiar with and then use selections by creating and saving selections to the alpha channel and to a new folder you will create in Paint Shop Pro named simply, "selections". More and more of the new tutorials online are including pre-made selections that have been created to use with a particular tutorial. It is these provided selections that you will have to unzip into your Paint Shop Pro selections folder.   Selection Basics A selection is a temporarily isolated area of an image that you can edit without altering the non-selected areas of the image. You can move a selection, paint it, copy it, save it and apply special effects to it. A selection is defined by a marquee (border of black and white dashes). A marquee can move with or without the defined area of the image. When you move only the marquee it becomes a "New Selection". There are three tools in Paint Shop Pro for creating selections: The Selection Tool - Makes selections of precise shapes The Freehand Tool - Makes selections of irregular shapes The Magic Wand - Makes selections based on range of color, hue & brightness   Tip: There are keyboard shortcuts (hot keys) that are easy to remember to activate these tools quickly: The Selection Tool simply hit the "S" key The Freehand Tool simply hit the "A" key The Magic Wand simply hit the "M" key   Saving a Selection You can save selections in two ways: As a file with the .sel extension saved in the selections folder on your hard drive. First you will need to open your PSP folder and create a new folder and name it selections. You will now have a separate folder in PSP for selections as you do for tubes, masks, etc. To save new selections choose> Selections>Save to Disk, then select the selections folder that you made in your PSP folder. (Make sure that you save the selection with the .sel extension.)     As an alpha channel you are saving the selection as a grey scale bitmap within an image. Both selections and masks can be saved to the alpha channel, so you can load a mask as a selection and selections as a mask. To save new selections to the Alpha Channel choose> Selections>Save to Alpha Channel. The image name will appear in the available documents box and you will see the image in the preview display. In the Alpha Channels List, double click the New Channel selection In the New Channel box type a name for the selection Click OK and PSP saves the selection to the alpha channel. If you are not going to use the selection, you can deselect it from the selections menu as you now have it saved to the alpha channel.     Loading Selections As there are two ways to save selections there are two ways to load them respectively. As you encounter different tutorials that provide pre-made selections after you have unzipped them into your selections folder Loading from Disk is how you will access them. Loading from a Disk If using layers make sure that you have make the layer you want the selection on the active layer Choose Selections>Load from Disk Locate the selection that you want to load Click Open     Loading from Alpha Channel If using layers make sure that you have make the layer you want the selection on the active layer Choose Selections>Load from Alpha Channel To load a selection from the current image, leave the current image name in the "Available Documents". To load a selection from another image, select its file name. In the Alpha Channels list, click the selection or mask you want to load Click OK     Deselecting a Selection The deselect command removes the marquee and border from a selection. This does not however delete the selection from the Alpha Channel. In order to delete a selection from the Alpha Channel you will have follow steps 1-4 above and then chose delete.   Lesson Plan Now that we have covered the basics of selections you are ready to go have some fun. Here are three (3) online tutorials. Please submit at least one tutorial result to the group or you can submit one for each tutorial.   Pansy - http://moonwolf.250free.com/Tutorials/pansy.html Adirondack Chair - http://www.prestigiousdames.com/char/adirondack_chair/ Teddy Bear - http://www.webartbysue.com/barbspsp/NRTeddy/NRTeddy.html Alpha Channel Selections     Bonus Tutorial IF you have time & IF you want to, these are some more selection tutorials - NOT required!! Zebra - http://www.pnwwebdesign.com/graphics/Tutorials/Zebra/zebratutorial.html Itsy Bitsy Mitzy - http://prestigiousdames.com/char/puppy/ Baby Shoes - http://ljgdesign.com/tutorials/babyshoe/index.html   Lesson Resources There is always more to know and learn about Paint Shop Pro. Here are a few online resources that you might find helpful: PSP 8 Information:  Using and Setting up Selections in PSP 8 http://suzshook.topcities.com/tutorials/8selectionfolders/ What's an Alpha Channel: http://campratty.com/1faq/faqpages/a12.html   Lesson Submittal Please remember to resize your final image so that it is no larger than 350 pixels on the largest/longest side. Please name your results as:  Your name - selection1 (for tutorial 1) Your name - selection2 (for tutorial 2) Your name - selection3 (for tutorial 3) Submit your results to the group at http://pspimagianrium.com/forum     ::Index:: ::Intermediate Series:: ::Glossary:: ::Short Cut Keys:: ::Resources::   Copyright © 2000-2004 PSPImaginarium All rights reserved. Unless specifically made available for download, no graphics or text may be removed from this site for any reason without express written permission from PSPImaginarium Paint Shop Pro is a registered trademark of Jasc Software, Inc.