Magic Wand …
For my next magic trick*, I will turn this background into funk! ::Dazzle::
The magic wand tool is one of the most easily overlooked tool in any web developers’ arsenal. Now I’m not trying to be a designer but this serves as a quick insight on what I know about the tool, and also a plea to any design gurus out there to inject anything that I might have missed.
The purpose of the magic wand tool [W] is to select areas of similar color. Depending on the tolerance setting, it can select contiguous pixels or all pixels with matching color in an entire document. To use this, just click on the area you want to select and voila! See below for an example:
Let’s take Sunil here for example:
and say he’s tired of being in an office setting and want to frolic in a flowery scene. We can take his image and using the magic wand tool, select just his background:
You can delete the background by either pressing [del] or cutting the selection (ctrl-x) and you’ll have Sunil on white:
The next step is of course find our favorite sunflower scene and create a new layer and insert the scene and get …
And now the icing on the cake …
Obviously with more time and effort it wouldn’t look as yucky, but a quick demo with Gimp on using the magic wand tool. Yes, I said it, I was using Gimp, which means those of you Fireworks and/or Photoshop can also do this.
*See any SPG member about why we shouldn’t say ‘Magic Trick’
Jeffrey.li
Is there any web sites or articles you would recommend for first time users to gimp and image editors?
Rick - below are a few links that may be helpful to you, I listed them in the order of how helpful they were to me:
There is a great book out there called: Grokking the GIMP (ref: http://gimp-savvy.com/BOOK/index.html) and they go into details about the tools found in GIMP. This book has been around for quite some time and there are a lot of good reviews and comments about this.
Online documentation is also available: http://docs.gimp.org/en/
For how-to tutorials:
1.) http://www.gimp-tutorials.com/
2.) http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/
3.) http://www.tutorialized.com/tutorials/Gimp/1
The tutorials get into how achieve a certain effect, but in the course of that, you’d go through several tools and that’s how I first picked them up. Also, with Gimp being an open source competition to popular Adobe products, functionalities are shockingly similar between Gimp and Photoshop (keyboard shortcuts are different), so the basic tools and commands like marquee, magic wand, layer controls, image resizing and etc are identical so you don’t have to learn new tools again.
I’m not sure if you are aware, but at Solid Cactus we’re building a training center and will be offering evening classes for anyone. If you are interested, I can look into starting a course like “Intro to GIMP”, where we can discuss common topics and techniques. Let me know what you think.
Good luck on your adventure into using GIMP.
Yes I would be interested in something like that. This is my first time playing around with image editing so I an pretty much new to every thing. Only things I really know is croping, resizing and rotating images.
Will there be a web page or something of the classes being held and when?
We are finishing construction of the training center for the upcoming Boot Camp, so the classes should follow shortly. When we have the courses finalized, I can either send you a link to the site or personally email you about upcoming course offerings.
OK, if you can email me when you get more details that would be perfect!