Microsoft Paint : Tools
The Selection Tools

These tools are used to select portions of the image you’re working with. These selections can then be moved around, copied, or edited without affecting the rest of the image.

To use the Freeform Select tool:

  1. Click on the Freeform Select tool Icon.
  2. With the left button, click on your image wherever you want to begin the selection. Drag the mouse around to create the outline of the freeform shape of your selection. Be careful! The mouse is tricky to use. It may help to zoom in using the Magnifying Glass tool. Zoom in close so you can see what you’re working with more clearly, and to control the mouse with better precision.
  3. When you finish outlining your freeform selection shape, release the mouse button.
You will notice that the freeform shape that you had been drawing has just mysteriously turned into a rectangle! What gives? Actually, your freeform shape is still preserved; the selection, however, is outlined in a rectangular-shaped guide box. The freeform selection is bounded within this box. If you move the selected portion of the image around, you’ll notice that it still retains the freeform shape that you drew. This may confuse you at first, but you’ll get used to it before long.

To use the Rectangle Select tool:

  1. Click on the Rectangle Select tool Icon.
  2. With the left button, click and hold the button to begin your selection. Where you click will become one of the corners of the rectangular selection area.
  3. Drag the mouse diagonally to where you want the opposite corner of the rectangular area to be.
  4. Release the mouse button.
The Rectangular selection will also have a rectangular shaped guide box around it.

Things you can do with the selected area:

Copy or Cut and Paste: To copy the selection, press Ctrl-C. To cut the selection from the image, press Ctrl-X. After Copying or Cutting, you can Paste the selection by pressing Ctrl-V. By Pasting multiple times, you can achieve a mosaic or collage-like effect.

Move: Left-click anywhere inside the guidebox and hold down the button to "pick up" the selection, and then drag the mouse to move the selection to another area of the image. It will "float" over the rest of the image, allowing you to position it wherever you want it to be. Release the mouse button to "let go" of the selection.

Tip:  If you hold down the Shift key as you drag your selection around, it will paste multiple copies of the image, creating a sort of blurred effect.
Stretch: The guide box around your selection can be re-sized. You can resize by clicking on the square-shaped tabs located at the corners and the middle sections of the guide box, holding the mouse button down, and then dragging the mouse to change the size of the selection. Release the mouse button when the selection is the size you want it to be. You can make it bigger or smaller, and achieve a distorted effect by "squashing" or "stretching" the selection to make it either wider/narrower or taller/shorter than its original proportions.

Apply Effects: You can apply any of the effects from the Image Menu directly to the active selection rather than to the whole image.

De-selecting the area: To de-select the area, either activate a different tool by clicking on it in the tool bar, or make a new selection. You can’t have more than one selection active at a time.  Once the selection is de-selected, it becomes part of the image again, and will cover over whatever it may have been laying over.

Example:
Using selections to combine two separate images.  This example uses selections in several ways to achieve interesting results.  This page uses a lot of graphics to show step-by-step the procedures used in using the Selection Tools, so I've set it up as a separate page, to decrease the amount of time it takes to download.

After you've finished looking at the example, please procede to learn about the Menu commands.

Online reader, Matti Nikki, submitted some additional information:

"You are also missing the Ctrl-drag feature in selection tool description, which I think is quite significant feature. If you hold down ctrl when you begin to move a selection, it will create an instant copy which you can then position. This is especially useful with the transparent selection mode, you know, those two buttons in the selection mode you don't talk about.

"One of the things I use transparent copying for is to create a 50% raster. It takes some patience but starting in zoom helps and it works like this:
1. Draw a 45 degree line (using shift with line tool)
2. Copy the line right next to itself, leaving one pixel gap
3. Select both lines and copy, repeat You should end up with a raster that has every other pixel white and every other something else.

"Transparent copies are also superior to freeform selection in some cases, in your selection tool example you could've painted the edge pixels with background color before moving it to the new picture. This way you could've avoided the cruft near the edges and made it look like a better fit.

"I mentioned the 50% raster above, there's a very nice use for it in the transparent copying, requiring two steps. The first step is to create a purple-on-white 50% raster using the technique I've described above. Once you have the raster made, use transparent copying to put the raster on top of another image, and you should end up with an image that has every other pixel purple. After this, choose purple as your background color and keep the transparent mode when you copy it elsewhere. If you followed the steps properly, you should have image with a fake 50% transparency, which you can place on top of another image. For extra smoothness, do this with images that have been scaled up 200% and then scale them down afterwards, and it will no longer be a fake raster, MS Paint will merge the pixels.

"Regarding rasters, the black&white mode you can select in the image->attributes menu is perfect for creating transparency masks for the above technique."