Conlan Garvey on March 23rd 2012
9086 views

Selecting and fading image ...

Hi, there once again. A lot of work seems to have gone into RWP but I'm finding it increasingly bewildering to use. I was using the lasso tool where the brush, pencil and eraser are located. When I finally just now stumbled upon the selection tools under the magic wand (there is _no_ selection pulldown menu), I said "ah ha", that's why it wasn't working, I was using a secondary, unknown lasso tool. Only to find, to my horror, more weird behaviour, I'll select something and the image fades and even when you hit "apply" the image doesn't come back to it's proper brilliance.

So I'm not sure I'm going to continue playing around with this app at this point. I'll just use it for the simple stuff where it goes beyond what MS Paint can do. I'll definitely re-visit in future for sure to see if it can do more. The third thing I use a graphics editor for is to paste pictures/picture elements _into_ another picture but that requires selection tools that behave differently that RWP seems to do at present while also requiring for the aspect ratio to show up as you're selecting so that the end result isn't distorted (something one sees a lot on the web). And it requires a "Paste into selection" that resizes to fit, something RWP doesn't seem to have. PictBear didn't do this either which is why, along with it's lack of true portability (toolbar could be customized but it's all saved to the registry ... dumb). So PictBear and RealWorld Paint show the most promise as contenders but they're not quite there yet.

Unfortunately, GIMP still seems the best to date; it's just unfortunate I hate its interface. It's clunky and not easy to use at all. NOT nice <g>.

Again, lots of work went into this and many, many kudos for that. But it still seems to be at the early stages of development. Nothing wrong with that; it's freeware and so a very great job so far! But I'm rooting for you and hope you'll continue. The freeware world truly needs a great portable freeware alternative to PSP and PhotoShop!

Good luck!

Vlasta on March 24th 2012 0

OK, now it makes sense why you were getting different results than I expected with the lasso tool earlier. RWPaint has lasso selection and normal lasso that is for drawing. The lasso selection really works exactly as Photoshop lasso - the graying out is how selection is visualized in RWPaint (instead of the marching ants) - I would recommend you to watch the image selections tutorial and it should become clear.

To get rid of the fading (selection) press ESC, or Undo.

To accomplish what you described, you probably should do this:

select region that will be replaced with lasso
press Delete - this will make a hole in the image
press Ctrl+V to paste whatever you want to put into that hole (or drag and drop an image on the canvas)
make sure the Paint under blending mode is active - this places the pasted image under the main image
move the pasted selection into place and scale it (enable "Preserve aspect ratio" in the drawing tool configuration panel if you wish)

True, there is no direct "paste into selection" command, but step #5 should not take more than 5 seconds and I presume you would usually want to scale/position/rotate the pasted image anyway.

If you want, I can create a tutorial that demonstrates this - though I would need some sample images - preferably the unprocessed image and then the expected result.

RWPaint is much younger than PSP, but I bet it can do most of what PSP can do and sometimes more. But it works differently. It is not a 1:1 copy of Photoshop nor is its goal to become one. Creating yet another a copy of Photoshop would be pointless.

Anonymous on May 9th 2012 0