Ah...misunderstood what you were talking about. I have problems steering the lasso as well -- it seems to either want to
grab too much or not enough and then want to toggle back and forth between too much & too little but not exactly on
what I wanted. So far, the only thing I've found that allows me to place the cutting line where I want it is the
pen tool -- but that's **s**o** *t*e*d*i*o*u*s*.
As for the feather -- I got confused as to one program I've tried, 'Painter', I think, uses a feather
shape as it's brush form. Neat thing about it though, it clearly shows the tilt and rotation of your physical pen
on a tablet -- but it's not a very powerful program for other things.
As for the feather you are talking about -- I *have* used feather, and up till yesterday thought it was the cat's
pajamas! But yesterday, as I was trying to clean up some individual sections via combinations of filling areas with
(trying multiple things to see what works best...) various tools. The simplest start fills of a path (or point+lines).
But so far, with that, all I get are monotone all-or-nothing's. It seems the least flexible.
If I select the path and create selected area, then I've found several other tools --
I'm sure I don't have all of them down or how to use all of them, but to name a few
I found and their behaviors,
paint bucket -- has advantage over simple file in that I can use opacity to control amount
of tint or show of previous image, still has disadvantage of being all or nothing.
gradients -- very hard to control. but can have allow for smooth transitons. If used with
opacity in the gradient can let previous layer show through.
A neet trick I stumbled into is after you have the rough area you want to work with, then you can re-edit that selection
with quick mask mode. Since you can use brushes, brushes also take an opacity. This means besides widening or narrowing
a selection, you can take
any area (inside or outside of the selection) and use % opacity -- a % opacity of black on the unselected area to
partially "select" it, and a %opacity w/white to partially select areas outside your selection.
This is *like* the 'feather' option, but is "user-controlled" -- I put that in quotes since while it
gives more control than the auto-feather, it's hard to tell how much an area is selected (%) inside or out, as
it's only a degree of the 'quick mask' color, which itself is a transparent color over your original
image. Might be better (just thought of this as I was writing, haven't tried it yet), but might be better to use a
99%-100% black for the opacity color -- then as you adjusted the selection, you'd see the areas that were more
selected as appearing as the real image, while areas that were entirely masked would show as black, while degrees of
image showing through the black would correspond to partial selection (or feathered areas).
In addition to the methods 'fill', paintbucket, and gradient, I 've also experimented with
clone brush+stamp - the stamp can be useful to help preserve texture from an area so it appears more like the print. But
it's hard to easily cover an area with that.
Have even tried paintbrush and it's variants -- but so far my experiments there have mostly ended up with blotchy
looking results (with a few exceptions). The lower extension of the legs of the picture at the start of this forum entry
were done with a smaller set of these tools, mostly clone and brush.
I keep trying out new things and thinking of other things to try -- I don't have alot of experience with any of the
tools & settings (like some ideas above that I haven't tried at all! :-)).
But the feather -- oh yeah -- problems... When trying to do fills of an area, if I have used feathers, on areas, I end
up with out clean lines where there should be clean lines. I get jaggies, and mismatched colors. I think the
auto-feather is useful when you are cut&pasting something from-to the same color background.
I don't remember if I knew about feathering in cut/paste when I did the above image. It's all been a pretty
steep learning curve.
Any comments on the things I've learned so far? Any caveats -- I'm learning some of them, but trial and
error...:-) But its like learning how to walk...you get up , you fall down....then you crawl and get up again....and
then fall...etc...:-)
Lots of falling down...but have to admit, am making progress in learning, just wish I could
learn faster while falling down less. :-)
A*a
.
, and 
. I think I like her against the dark
background better. But it's certainly not even close to a wall, it's just something to try to build something
around.
