Digital Light & Color

A friend has an image which contains a number of square shapes of solid colour, some of which are not horizontally/vertically level, each surrounded by a white border, on a white background (the reason the viewer knows they have a white border is the shapes partially overlap each other, but of course the borders that are situated over the white background are indistinguishable from the background). He is wishing to mask some of the squares along with their respective white borders.

The squares that are perfectly level are easy to accomplish using the rectangle tool with shift (at least from memory I think it is shift) to keep the square constant, however, the angled ones become more difficult. Using the polygon tool and eyeballing the edge where white meets white is inexact. I presume there is no way to rotate the rectangle tool? If not, any suggestions?

Thanks,

Marv

I suppose you could rotate the image using the Level transformation to mask the tilted squares. Nothing else comes immediately to mind other than the polygon tool.

Something I never even considered (that's what happens when focus is so narrowed - keep the picture straight and rotate the painter!!!). I'm not close to my image-editing computer so can't test this out immediately and am finding it hard to visualize. Does that mean the mask will be rotated and will have to be rotated back the other way to get it to fit on the horizontal original image or....?

What are you planning to do with the color square (with border) once you have the mask? For example, my first assumption was you were lifting the bordered square off to another image, in which case the composite tool might offer some options, since you can rotate things there.

The other possibility is to use the fill tool in the mask dialog to fill the rotated colored square, then use the feather tool (with step feather and square edges selected) and depending on how big the feather gets, you can expand the original selection to grab part of the border. The corners will be a little weird, but maybe that's good enough if all the corners are in the border area.

Anyway, if it helps to know what you next-step goal is, give us a bit more to go on.

Thanks,
Bob W

Bob,

In this case, the mask is for a friend who does media productions using a program, Photodex Proshow. He imports and uses masks made in PWP to make some objects appear to separate themselves from the background image and approach the viewer. I've helped him generate a number of masks before but they were all fairly easily done with the conventional tools.

Marv