Selections
A selection marks part of the picture. While something is selected, painting stays inside it, and the selection can be lifted into a floating piece that you move, flip, turn and scale, copied to the clipboard, or saved by name with the project.
- Making a selectionRectangle select, Lasso and Magic wand; adding and taking away; the Select menu, Grow and Shrink.
- Saved selectionsKeeping a selection by name in the project, the Selections panel, and loading it again.
- Moving and transformingFloating pieces: move, flip, turn at any angle, scale, outline and shadow, then place them.
- Cut, copy and pasteWithin Mosaicus and with other programs, across formats with different pixel shapes.
The selection tools
The four tools in the toolbar's second group work with selections:
| Tool | Key | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Move | V | Drags the selected pixels, and turns and scales a floating piece with its handles. |
| Rectangle select | M | Selects a rectangle. |
| Lasso | L | Selects a shape you draw around. |
| Magic wand | W | Selects an area of one color. |
The options bar's last item says what is selected, for example 320 pixels selected, or Floating 40 × 32 at 12, 50 · Enter places it, Esc puts it back while a piece floats.
What a selection does
- Painting stays inside it. The Pencil, the Eraser, Fill, the Gradient, Replace color, Shapes, Text and the Image stamp change only selected pixels. Fill's The selection choice fills all of it.
- Edit menu commands work on it:
- Clear (Del or Backspace) paints it in the picture's background color.
- Revert to conversion (Shift+Del) takes your hand edits away inside it, so the conversion shows there again.
- Fill with secondary paints it in the secondary color.
- Fill with fill style (Alt+Backspace) paints it in the Fill tool's fill style, the primary color first.
- Edit ▸ Brush ▸ Use selection as brush (Ctrl+B) makes the selected pixels the Pencil's brush, and Use selection as fill pattern (Ctrl+Shift+B) makes them a fill pattern in their own colors.
- Clean up strays works inside the selection, or on the whole picture when nothing is selected (see Checks).
- Transforms and the clipboard start from it: see Moving and transforming and Cut, copy and paste.
Each of these changes to the picture is one undo step, and each keeps the format's cell limits as painting does.
Selections and undo
Making, changing and clearing a selection aren't undo steps: Ctrl+Z undoes the last change to the picture, not the last selection. Saving, renaming and deleting a saved selection are undo steps, and a floating piece has undo steps of its own while it floats (see Moving and transforming).
The selection belongs to the picture as it is: a change of format or size that changes the picture's pixel count drops it (a saved selection follows the picture instead). A new picture or an opened project starts with nothing selected.