That makes a selection of all the darkest parts except that object that's in the background there that makes a light spot. Now point your magic wand at some part of the black area of the image at the top and click it. Then go back to the image, and type SHIFT-CTRL-A, which will select none of the image. Set the tool threshold to "20", which is pretty aggressive but not so much that we can't make fine distinctions in the image. But it turns out that it's not consistent enough, so we're going to select the background instead, using a function of this tool called "add to the current selection". See: it seems pretty obvious that we should try select the object in the foreground because it is a consistent color - it should be the easiest to select because it is all nearly the same color. If we raise the threshold any higher, we're going to get a lot of stuff we don't want, and we won't be any better off than we are right now.
But worse for us is on the left at the bottom of the piece where the threshold of the background is low enough that the places it touches the object we are trying to select cause the tools to select the background. The problem is that not all of it was selected - look at the base, and under the chin, and where his eye would be, and in the crest of his mane - these are dark areas which are as dark as the chess board which are outside the current threshold. Now, that looks pretty good, right? Most of the knight is selected. To see what I mean, set your threshold to "75" and select the horse's cheek again. That is: there are a lot of colors that are really close to each other in threshold. But we have a problem with the chess piece: this image has a really consistent color pallet. The irony, really, is that this value is not an integer, so it's not really an 8-but number, so they could have used percentage and not confused the track ball off of normal people, but (yawn) I can see that I am boring you with geek-speak.Īnyway, in simple image - like the one we made on the first lesson - the magic wand can be set at a certain threshold and simply select objects that are more or less a uniform color, and you can suck them right out of their context. At the risk of boring you to death, they use that number and not a sliding percent of threshold because 255 equals the largest number you can represent in an 8-bit number. If you slide the slider all the way to the right, you will find that the highest value for the tool - the highest level of threshold - is "255", which is really an uber-geek notation for "make no distinctions - include everything". That slider (and the numbers next to it) indicate a degree of difference between the base pixel you select from and the most-different pixel color the tool will select. Now, what does that mean? Take a look at your tool options for a second and notice that there's a slider there marked "Threshold". they all fall inside the same color threshold as the first pixel you selected
What the magic wand does is select an area of all the pixels in an image which meet the following criteria: That's sorta weird, huh? You got a lot of area that's surrounded by the "marching ants", but not all of of the picture was selected. Now - without changing any of the tool's setting, click someplace on the cheekbone of the knight's head.
Magic lasso tool in gimp mac#
In that snapshot of my desktop (I'm using my Mac laptop), you can see that I have selected the wand tool, and I have the tool options open so we can sort of skip over the basics. Well, let's open it in the GiMP and find out. But how did I peel it off the photo without, for example, picking up any of the grain of the chess board? This is also the image I used to nab the knight for the image we looked at, above.
Magic lasso tool in gimp license#
The image below was downloaded from, and falls under the wikimedia license for wikimedia images: But before we talk about the tool, let's all get the same base image to work with. That's where the magic wand (or, as the GiMP calls it, the "fuzzy select") tool comes in. And to make an image like this from other images, you have to be able to select areas of an image in ways a little more, um, artistic than merely using the rectangle-select tool. See: this image has 4 components - the white background, the foreshortened logo which looks like it's laying flat on a surface, the shadow over the logo but under the knight, and the knight itself. How do I go about building or designing really cool images like this one: OK: we have covered the really no-brainer tools in the tool set, but as we said, those tools aren't really all that better than the one you get with MS Paint.