Four Questions regarding Photoshop 7

[Physics_Guru]

I have a few questions regarding photoshop 7 and some of its features plus a technical question. If they are simple, please answer. If it is much more involved, please make a tutorial for the topic. :) -- I love the tutorials here. You cannot beat a step by step idiot proof lesson!!

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Technical:

Sometimes when I am dragging a selection maker (marque or lasso tool) around, the paletes and such that are visible flicker for a second, as well as the picture itself, and then they all go to the 'background GUI color' as if they were not there. Once I release the mouse or tablet pen, the selection has the marching ants and all the paletes, pictures, ect. come back.

I am running a Athalon XP 1800+ (1.5 GHz) with 1 GB memory and an Ati Radeon All in Wonder 9800 with 128 MB on board memory. Do I need more memory or is this cuased by something else?

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Basic:

Can you move the sides of a marque selection after it has been made? Am example is using the square marque. I may miss the edge I want by a pixel or two. Up till now I have just been going back a click in the history and doing it again. Kind of a pain in the butt. I could also use the 'Add to Selection' setting and just grad the parts I want. But I am hoping there is a way to adjust the edges like when using the crop tool.

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More Advanced?:

What is quick mask mode and what is it used for?

What are paths used for and how do you use them?

What is slicing and how do you use that?

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Thanks!!

[123456789]

[quote=PG]Can you move the sides of a marque selection after it has been made? Am example is using the square marque. I may miss the edge I want by a pixel or two. Up till now I have just been going back a click in the history and doing it again. Kind of a pain in the butt. I could also use the 'Add to Selection' setting and just grad the parts I want. But I am hoping there is a way to adjust the edges like when using the crop tool.
[/quote]
For this, go into Select>Transform Selection. A bounding box will appear and you will be able to scale and rotate. (Don't forget - hold down Shift when scaling to scale proportionately.)
I'll leave the rest to the tut writers. ;)

[Chris49]

"What is quick mask mode and what is it used for?"

It is a vary nice and easy was of making a Selection, you can draw where you want your Selection then come out ot Quick mask and your Selection will be active.

hope that helps

[Scott]

I can't comment on the first one.. sounds like a video issue. But I'm not very proficient with PC system trouble shooting.

Second one 1-9 answered well :)

Quick mask is essentially the same as all other masks. it's a mask. The difference is it's a selection mask that isn't saved. When you enter quick mask mode you can paint, select, delete, run filters, do anything you would do on any other mask. Then when you exit quick mask mode you are left with a selection based on your quick mask. Think of quick mask as a way to use all the masking features in order to just create a selection rather than a mask that can be altered later or saved with the document. Once you leave qm it's gone. You have the selection it made but it's not stored anywhere else. Normal masks can be saved with a document.


Paths are used for various things. They can be used to create more accurate selections. You can use them to draw custom shapes. With Photoshop CS you can draw a path and place text on it so that your text follows the path.

Slicing is only for web content. Slicing is the process of breaking up a large image into small pieces then putting the pieces back together. This does a couple things. On a web page it gives the impression of faster load times to users because they see a lot of smaller images loading rather than waiting for one image to completely load. Slicing allows you to also alter how an image is optimized for the web. It allows you to take one image and save part of it as a gif and part as a jpg or part as a png and then put the pieces together seamlessly. Slices are also helpful when building rollover images for web content. If you aren't creating web pages then slicing is of no use at all. As for how to do it. It's pretty involved. Check out the help files and do a google search there are many articles and tutorials on the web explaining how to slice an image.

[1cowabunga]

Here's some basic things you may not know PG: You can enter quick mask mode by pressing Q and then Q again to exit. About marque selections, if you have the correct size of a selection but it is in the wrong place by a few pixels or whatever, just tap the arrow keys (left, right, up, or down) and it will slide your selection to where you want it. --(just some tips from the peanut gallery) :)

~Sam

[down2earth2]

[QUOTE=Jolt]Quick mask is essentially the same as all other masks. it's a mask. The difference is it's a selection mask that isn't saved. When you enter quick mask mode you can paint, select, delete, run filters, do anything you would do on any other mask. Then when you exit quick mask mode you are left with a selection based on your quick mask. Think of quick mask as a way to use all the masking features in order to just create a selection rather than a mask that can be altered later or saved with the document. Once you leave qm it's gone. You have the selection it made but it's not stored anywhere else. Normal masks can be saved with a document.[/QUOTE]

More on Quick Mask. Being new to quick mask, I'd suggest two fairly effective, easy uses for it. When you make a selction, hit "Q" to enter quick mask. Here you can see the actual mask. Now you can use the Paint Brush to fine tune your mask by painting with black (to create more mask), or white (to remove mask). My second suggestion is to then use Gaussian Blur to feather the selection. A guassian Blur of 2, is comparable to feathering your "marching ants" selection 2 pixels. The advantage doing it in Quick Mask is that you can see the blur. Hit "Q" again and you'll return to a "Marching ants" display of your selection.


[QUOTE=Jolt]Paths are used for various things. They can be used to create more accurate selections. You can use them to draw custom shapes. With Photoshop CS you can draw a path and place text on it so that your text follows the path.[/QUOTE]

I could not live without paths! The most practical use for paths is to save a selection. Say in your space shuttle picture you've made a selection of the sky. You don't want to have to redraw that selection every time you want to make additional changes to the sky. So you save the selection as a path, which you can easily reload whenever you want.

When you have a selection you want to save, click the "Make work path from selection" button at the bottom of the Path Palette. NAME IT! or the next path you make will displace it. To later load that path as a selection, hit the "Load Path as Selection" button at the bottom of the Path Palette.

I included my paths palette from a colorization I just finished and labled the buttons on the palette you need to use. You can see I saved almost every selection I made. One thing to remember is that when you save a selection as a path, it doesn't save any feathering information. To save a selection, AND the feathering, you have to save it as an Alpha Channel, but that's another story.