Technical types may be wondering what the Tolerance control, on the Flood Fill tool’s Tool Options palette, is good for. In this chapter, we bypass the need to use that control by instruct-ing you to select the area you want to fill and then use a Match mode of None. We think that that’s the easiest way to fill a specific area.
An alternative to selecting an area beforehand with a selection tool is to use the Flood Fill tool
itself to determine which pixels are to be filled, according to their color or other qualities.
Choose a Match mode other than None, and then set tolerance. The Flood Fill tool deter-mines what pixels to fill based on those settings, exactly as the Magic Wand tool does to deter-mine what pixels to select.
Two problems show up in the current picture of Alex, though, as shown in Figure 9-15:
One, he has no halo — but we draw that.
Two, the Weekly World Newsuses only black-and-white photos, and that light slatted background behind Alex isn’t dark enough to make the halo stand out. We rectify that in eight easy steps!
If you’re reading ahead in this chapter, you may notice that the doorbell directly above Alex’s head, as shown in all the other pictures of Alex in this book, isn’t present here. We got rid of that using the Clone Brush; refer to Chapter 8 to find out how to remove unsightly doorbells from your pictures.
1. Select the slatted background behind Alex.
As we discuss earlier in this chapter, in “Coloring within the Lines By Using Selection,” you want to select the background to make sure that you don’t accidentally draw over Alex’s head while you’re changing the slats. Refer to Chapter 3 for help with getting exactly the selection you want.
(For the record, we used the Magic Wand Tool set to a Match mode of Color, a tolerance of 17, a feather of 1, and a large amount of judicious Shift+clicking to clean up the small patches of unselected areas.) 2. Select the Paint Brush tool from the brush tool group.
3. Change the material (as we discuss in Chapter 3), and then do a test paint along the edges to make sure that the edges look good.
We selected a dark red material for our paint, but we set the opacity for our Paint Brush to 50 (half-transparent) so that the slatting still appears through the paint. As you can see in Figure 9-16, our brush strokes have stopped at the marquee edge of the selection, right above Alex’s Buddha-like gaze.
If you don’t see the Tool Options palette, press F4.
Figure 9-15:
Alex, unedited dog about town.
4. Paint the entire selected area.
You could also use the Flood Fill tool with a Match set to none. The Flood Fill tool is at its best, though, on fairly even areas that are mostly the same color, like the sky in the Fill example earlier in this chapter — not areas with dark vertical streaks through it, like this one. Besides, you’re already using the Paint Brush tool, so why switch? The final results are just as good, as shown in Figure 9-17.
5. Deselect the area.
Alex’s halo needs to be big and impressive. So big and impressive, in fact, that it sticks out of the current selection — and as long as we have the background selected, we can’t paint outside the lines. If you don’t feel like skipping to Chapter 12, where we tell you how to deselect, you can either press Ctrl+D or choose Selections➪Select None.
6. Select the Airbrush tool from the brush tool group.
A halo is supposed to be fuzzy, so we airbrushed it in. The airbrush also makes it easy to build up the halo from repeated loops so that we don’t have to be so careful about shape.
Figure 9-17:
The now repainted wall forms a darker background.
Figure 9-16:
Testing a small patch of the new, transparent paint color for the wall.
7. Set the Airbrush options on the Tool Options palette and choose your color (texture, pattern) from the Materials palette.
A halo is supposed to be fuzzy and bright white, so we picked a pure white color from the Materials palette. We wanted a reasonably small line for our halo, so a size of 11 seemed about right — and a halo is sup-posed to be bright, so we cranked up the Opacity to 100 so that the background doesn’t bleed through.
This process still doesn’t address the “fuzziness” issue — but the Hardness and Step settings do. We reduced the Hardness to 0 to provide maximum fuzziness, and we set the Step to 35 to produce a slightly spot-tier line.
8. Draw a halo.
Keep a steady hand, here! Alex’s reputation is at stake! (see Figure 9-18).
What’s that, you say? It looks fake? Have you ever seen the Weekly World News?
You may be asking “Isn’t Alex’s halo a little shaky there? Doesn’t Paint Shop Pro have a tool for drawing perfect shapes, like circles, squares, and elliptic halos?” Of course, it does — and we show you how to draw better halos in Chapter 12.
Figure 9-18:
Beatific Alex.