Why can I not do this?

[MikeFromMesa]

I found myself working on some very old photos taken about 15 years ago with a very inexpensive digital camera. The shots were mostly OK but they suffered badly from lens distortion and often the AP lens distortion filter was not enough to fix it. Some of the photos were taken inside buildings and the lens distortion often distorted the walls in such a way that even the Perspective Tool was not enough to fix the issue. What I wanted to do was to select a rectangle, invert the selection and then use the clone tool to clone a background color leaving only the earlier selected wall alone. The problem was that the rectangle I wanted to select was not perfectly horizontal and vertical, but was on an angle so the rectangular Marquee Tool did not do what I wanted.

 

I thought I had two choices - rotate the image so that the Marquee Tool would work, or find some way to draw a rectangle using the hand-held selection tool. I tried the second method but could not get a straight enough line to work for me so I began to wonder why there is no tool in AP that would allow me to select a point, select a second point, have AP draw a straight line from point 1 to point 2, then go to point 3, repeat, and so on until I closed the polygon. That way I could select a triangle, rectangle, pentagon, hexagon or any other multi-sided figure, have AP connect the adjacent nodes with straight lines and I could do that without a lot of work. Of course there is also the possibility that such a tool already exists in AP and I have just not found it.

 

Is there such a tool? If so, which one? If not, why not? Or am I alone in wanting such a tool?

[My Strawberry Monkey]

Hi Mike,

 

Unless I misunderstood the question, you can use the Pen Tool to create your points, then once closed, in the context tool bar choose selection and it will make a selection based on the shape you've drawn out.

[MikeFromMesa]

Hi Mike,

 

Unless I misunderstood the question, you can use the Pen Tool to create your points, then once closed, in the context tool bar choose selection and it will make a selection based on the shape you've drawn out.

Yes. That is exactly what I wanted to do. I guess I need to sit down and go through the tutorials again because, after all this time using AP, I did not know what the Pen Tool did, or that it was what I needed.

 

Thank you very much for your post. Now I need to go back to some of those earlier photos and redo them.

[My Strawberry Monkey]

No worries. Glad I could help.

[kirkt]

If you hold down the SHIFT key while using the freehand selection tool (the "lasso") you will constrain it to straight lines between clicks of the mouse.

 

Remember that when you select a tool, there are helpful tool modifier hints along the bottom of the image window, including the one I just described.

 

kirk

[MikeFromMesa]

If you hold down the SHIFT key while using the freehand selection tool (the "lasso") you will constrain it to straight lines between clicks of the mouse.

 

Remember that when you select a tool, there are helpful tool modifier hints along the bottom of the image window, including the one I just described.

 

kirk

This is another piece of functionality that I was not aware of. I really need to clean my glasses and  read the help information at the bottom of the screen.

 

However, when I tried this, my experience is that it does not constrain the selection to a straight line but rather adds a straight line to the already-done selection. Thus, given my shaky hand, if I try to select a straight line using the shift key I get a wobbly line (from my inability to keep the cursor moving straight) followed by an enclosing straight line. This can be very helpful, but it is not what I needed for the correction I was working on.

 

However it reminds me how complete AP actually is. I have been using it since the first Beta, but apparently I learned what I needed to do for the stuff I usually do and then stopped trying to learn more. Thus, when I tried to go back and do some really intensive retouching work (removing people, correcting really bad distortion, removing flash reflections, straightening buildings, etc) I ran out of what I already knew.

 

Thanks for the post.

[kirkt]

Take your example, trying to select a rectangular window.  Use the lasso tool, with SHIFT depressed, and click on each successive corner of the window area - the selection line will "connect the dots" drawing a line between each clicked point and its subsequent neighbor.  When you click on the original starting point, the selection will be closed and you will get the marching ants outline of the rectangular selection area.

 

I apologize if I am not quite understanding what you are trying to do.

 

kirk

[MikeFromMesa]

Take your example, trying to select a rectangular window.  Use the lasso tool, with SHIFT depressed, and click on each successive corner of the window area - the selection line will "connect the dots" drawing a line between each clicked point and its subsequent neighbor.  When you click on the original starting point, the selection will be closed and you will get the marching ants outline of the rectangular selection area.

My mistake. I re-read your instructions and this time, when I did what you wrote, it worked. I am not sure why I misunderstood your post before, but I have it now.

 

Thanks for following up.

[smadell]

Mike...

 

Maybe I have misunderstood your question, but the solution seems so exceedingly straightforward. If you choose the "Lasso" tool, there is an option in the Content Toolbar to allow the kind of selection you need.

 

[MikeFromMesa]

Mike...

 

Maybe I have misunderstood your question, but the solution seems so exceedingly straightforward. If you choose the "Lasso" tool, there is an option in the Content Toolbar to allow the kind of selection you need.

 

Yes, but selecting polygon does not guarantee a straight line when drawing. I tried that and ended up with a curved wiggly line.

 

The Pen Tool does what I need as does using the Shift key.

[smadell]

So... I discovered something also. If you choose the Lasso tool, and then choose Polygonal as the type, you can get a combination of curvy lines and straight lines.

 

If you simply click, you will select by means of a series of straight lines, drawn between the clicks. If you click and drag, you can draw a "curved wiggly line." If you click and drag to draw a curvy line and then release the mouse button while still moving the cursor, you will draw a straight line from the point of release to the point of the next mouse click.