selection tools question

[Chris Northcross]

I was playing around with the region selection toolset yesterday and came up with a question about the selection modification tools: how do you alter their default settings? If I want to add a feather to a selection using those tools, it seems (to me) that its either an all or none approach. I can't make it feather less and the only way I seem to be able to feather more is to run the selection operation more. Likewise for smoothing, expanding and contracting a selection. Is there a way to change the default setting through the menu dialogues? If not, does anyone have alternative suggestions? A little background on what I'm trying to do" I have a movie that I'd like to isolate a single foreground person and create an alpha matte for using the selection tools. Though I'm not a big fan of manual rotoscoping, SA is a lot more fun and feels a lot less tedious than going the bezier method in After Effects or trying to do it manually in photoshop. I'd like to take the selection and turn it into an alpha channel.

[Synthetik]

There's no way currently to alter the default settings for the selection modification menu commands.

However, you can use Studio Artist extensive set of image operations to build custom presets that process the current selection. So it's easy to build your own adjustable feathering, or smoothing, or expansion, or contraction presets. You can set the Ip Source to Region Selection, and then if you set the Composite option to Replace Region Selection then the ip op output will be routed back to be the current selection.

[Chris Northcross]

This is pretty cool. Is there a tip for which ip ops work with this command? So far the sketch mass and sketch edge ip ops seem to be the two that feed into it. Are there any others?

[liveart]

Chris

For what john is suggesting all of the imops will work. To get a nice feather try the smart blur or morphol imops. I suggest that you try a few experiments start by selecting a rectangle or circle on a solid color background. switch over to the imop panel. Make sure that the mask check box at the top tool bar is checked.

The try a smart blur with rgb source orient, 60% mix ipsource = region selection composite = replace region selection. composite space =rbg.

you will have to futz a bit to get your desired result. One you do save (export) the imop, and you will be good to go in the future.

If smart blur is not getting you to where you want to be try Morphol, smart displace or smooth. For contract result I might try a smart contrast. I just did an experiment with Geodesic Recursive Growth that worked pretty well for a soft contract.

John, if you could add region selection to the source options of the scale Uniform Adjust warp ( or all the warps for that matter) it would be very helpful.

[Synthetik]

Smooth ip op with the blur edge algorithm works well for building smoothing presets for selection processing.

[Synthetik]

Like Mike said, you can use all of the ip ops to process the selection. The sketch mass and sketch edge presets are ones that can work to generate bezier paths, but that's different than just processing the selection frame buffer, which all of the ip ops can do.

[Charles Floading]

Chris,

Dig around in your presets folder(s). Back when this feature was added to Studio Artist, I put together a pretty extensive collection of presets to modify the masks. Everything from blurring edges to reducing opacity plus some whacky stuff that would be very cumbersome or impossible in Photoshop.

I'm pretty sure these presets ended up in with the releases. Might be in a "User" category... The main folder would be called "Region Selection" with subfolders called things like "BLUR selection" and "Expand" etc..

If you don't have it, I'm going to try to use the "upload files" feature here on Ning to attach the presets to this post. They might give a good starting point for what you're looking to do.

I forget which version of SA I made them in. They for sure work in versions 3.5 and 4. Drop them in the folder Presets>ImageOp

Region Selection.zip

[liveart]

Thanks for the re-post. I remember these from way back but they certainly are not in my collection any more. Great to have them back.