Example:  Using selections to combine two images.

Let's say you have a project to do on Greek mythology.  You want to take a photograph of a centaur, the mythical half-man, half-horse.  Sadly, there are none available for you to take pictures of.  What can you do?

Since the centaur is half-man, half-horse, I looked around on the internet for pictures of men and horses.  The depictions on traditional mythology show the centaur to be a muscular man, so I did some searching for bodybuilders.  I looked around on different websites for a while, until I could find some pictures that were just right for what I wanted to do. Here's the original pictures that I found:

Now, the body builder picture was just about perfect for my needs.  Due to the simple black background color in this image, it was a simple matter for me to open it in Paint and use the Fill tool to change the black background to white.  Then, using the Eraser Tool, I deleted the body builder's legs.

I could have used the irregular selection tool to select just the man's torso, arms, and head, but it was just easier to do it this way.  Anyway, here's what I ended up with:

Now, using the Irregular Selection Tool, I just drew loosely around the figure to create a selection.  Making sure that the Tool Options were set so that the background color was set to transparent, I then went into the Edit Menu and used the "Copy To" command to copy my selection to a new file.  I had to do this because Paint will only allow you to work with one open file at a time, and I was now ready to work with the picture of the horse.

First, I opened up the picture of the horse.  Looking at it, I thought that it looked like there wasn't enough room at the top of the picture for the body builder to fit.  It looked like his head might get cut off at the top of the frame.  So, the first thing I did was re-size the "image canvas".

To do this, I first went to the Edit Menu and used the "Select All" tool to select the entire image.  Then, I used the Cut command (also in the Edit Menu) to lift the selection from the background of the image.  Then, using the mouse, I clicked on the "grab handle" (located at the middle of the bottom edge of the image) and I dragged downward to make the canvas a little bit taller.  Once the image canvas was resized, I used the Paste Command (again, in the Edit Menu) to place the horse back into the picture.  Clicking on the selection, I dragged it down to the bottom of the image, to leave room up at the top for the body.

Here's how it ended up (I put a border along the edge of the image so you could see the extra white space at the top:

The next thing I needed to do was place the man's body onto the horse's neck.  To do this, I went into the Edit Menu once again, and used the "Paste From" command.  The following error message popped up:

I clicked "Yes" and the image automatically enlarged to fit the pasted object.  So, it turns out I didn't really need to have tried to enlarge the image canvas myself.  Still, that's a good thing to know how to do -- and we'll need to do it again later.

Now, I had my body and my horse together in the same picture.  Here's what they looked like:

Oops!  The man's body is much too big for the horse!  Oh, no... what can I do?  Wait, I know... I can use the Stretch command to re-size the body until it will fit onto the horse!  Just make sure that you keep the selection active after you first paste the man into the image so that you can work with it...  Just guessing, I figure about a 50% reduction is necessary to get the body down to the size I want it to be.  Go into the Image Menu, and click on the Stretch/Skew command.  Then type in 50% for the height and width.  Here's what we end up with:

Now, we can move the selection to fit right on top of the horse's neck, and re-size the image canvas to the size we wanted it.

Now, there's still the matter of getting rid of the horse's head.  We could just erase it, but if we did that, there'd be a big white, horse's head-shaped gap in the image, and it wouldn't fool anyone.  What we need to do then is delete the entire background of the picture.  We could have done this at the beginning too.  But I left the background in because I wasn't sure how much of the horse's head I would need to erase after I pasted in the body builder.

We have to be pretty precise with our erasing, so let's use the zoom tool to get in really close, then use the Eraser to delete the background and the horse's head from the picture. Remember to be very careful when you're close to the edge of the centaur.  Don't hold the mouse button down the whole time you're erasing; erase small portions of the image, clicking for each one.  That way, if you do make a mistake and need to use the Undo command, you will only Undo a small amount of the erasing and have to re-erase less of it over again.  Don't forget to change the size of the Eraser in the Tool Options, or use the Pencil or Paint Brush tools (with the color set to white, of course) if you have a tricky spot where the Eraser just won't fit.  And don't forget to Save the image periodically as you do your work.  When you save your work, make sure you save it as a bitmap (.BMP) file, not a .JPG file, or the quality of the image will degrade.  Saving as a .JPG will be your last step, and only necessary if you want to use the picture on a web page (like we are here).

Finally, you'll end up with something like this:

Pretty good, eh?  If you wanted, you could find a nice picture of a landscape and Copy/Paste our Centaur into it so that the picture would have a background...

That doesn't look fake at all!  I wonder if they're hiring at Industrial Light and Magic?  As you can see, using Selections can enable you to do some pretty impressive tricks in Microsoft Paint.  Once you've learned all the tools and commands, that is.

Click here to go Back to the Selection Tool.