Selective Adjustments

Many of Bibble 5's editing tools are already designed to work only on portions of an image, like the Fill Light tool's ability to only adjusts the shadows and darker portions of an image. But, the Fill Light tool will operate on ALL dark areas of an image. What if you only wanted to add Fill Light to SOME of the darker areas in an image? This is where Selective Editing comes in.

Layers are collections of Regions and Adjustments. A Layer can contain many Regions and many Adjustments.. All Regions in a single Layer will have the same Adjustments applied. This makes it very simple to apply a little brightening to the shadows of many separate faces in a photograph: create several circle regions over the faces in your photo, then add Fill Light to the Layer, thereby brightening the shadows in all the faces that you selected. You can also apply many Adjustments to a Layer.

Regions are selections of portions of an image where Bibble should apply certain tools. Regions can be simple circles, polygons with sharp corners, or curved shapes, or painted regions; these various shapes ensure you can select and edit any portion of an image quickly and easily.

Regions have two primary defining parts: Main Area and Feather Area. The Main Area is the portion within the solid lines of a Region, and this is where the full effect of editing tools applies to that region will be applied. Outside the Main Area is a Feather Area, where the strength of the image edits applied to the region will fade off from 100% at the inside edge of the Feather Area to 0% at the outer edge. Regions can also be inverted, so the edits applied to the Layer containing this Region apply to the portion of the image that is outside the Region's selected area.

Adjustments are the use of Bibble Adjustment tools to a Region. In order to adjust a portion of an image, you will need to select a portion of your image (using Regions, as described above) and tell Bibble what adjustments to do within that Region.

Not all Adjustment tools can be applied within Regions. Lens Distortion Correction, for example, alters the placement of specific pixels within the entire image, and thus is meaningless when applied to a Region.

In this example, we'll look at a wedding shot taken by Judy Hailey (www.haileystudios.com), shown to the right. This first image show the picture without any adjustments.
This second image shows the photograph after the blue colors have been desaturated to create an selective Black and White image. This effect was done with the Color Correction tool. While the desaturation focuses your attention on the bride, the blue in the flowers was also lost. Those flowers were a key element in this photo, so this is not the final effect we want.
This third image shows a Curved Region created around the flowers. After creating the region, the same selective color adjustment that was shown in the image above was applied to this Layer. This has the effect of desaturating all the blues in our region - only effecting the flowers. While this change did isolate the blue color of the flowers, this is also not the effect we desire.
This final image was created from the image above by simply inverting the curved region that outlined the flowers. Now, the all the blue portions of the image are desaturated - except those inside the region we created around the flowers.

To get started with Layers, open the Layer Manager Tool (shown on the right) by pressing the Layer button on the Layer Toolbar at the bottom of the Preview Panel. That will display the Layer Popup seen to the right. From here, you can add, delete, and rename Layers.

You can also select the type of Region you want to add to your image with the icons at the bottom of the Layer Popup: circular regions, polygon or curved regions, or brushed regions. After adding or picking an existing Layer, and then selecting the type of Region you want to create, you can click within your image to create a new region.

Layers-popup

Invert Layer: Select a Layer, then click to invert the layer. An inverted layer will apply the image adjustments for that layer only outside the regions for that layer instead of only adjusting the inside of the regions

Delete: Select a Region or a Layer from the list, then click to Delete the selected item

The Layer Tool includes the following buttons to select the cursor mode which allow you to create new regions or adjust existing regions of the type that match the cursor mode you've selected.

Circle Region Cursor: Select this to change the cursor mode to the Circle Region cursor tool

Polygon Region Cursor: Select this to change the cursor mode to the Polygon Region cursor tool

Curve Region Cursor: Select this to change the cursor mode to the Curve Region cursor tool

Brushed Region Cursor: Select this to change the cursor mode to the Paint Region cursor tool

The lower section of the Layer Manager is context sensitive, and adjusts to show tools that are useful depending on what layer or region is selected, as shown below:

Context area when a layer is selected, allowing you to adjust the overall layer opacity.
Context area when a clone circle is selected. The Circle size and feather can be adjusted, and the mode can be set to Heal or Clone. When cloning, you can press Swap Source to switch the clone source and destination.
Context area when a brushed region is selected, allowing you to adjust the brush size and opacity, and to add or subtract the next brush strokes to/from previous brush strokes. 'Show Strokes' will let you see where you have brushed on your image, and the color well lets you set the color your strokes will be shown in.

The first step to making Selective Adjustments is to isolate the area in your image that you want to adjust. Bibble 5 offers three methods of creating Regions.

From the Layer Popup, click the icon corresponding to the type of Region you want to create, then click in your image.

For Polygons and Curves, each click will set a new control point. Double-click to set the last control point.

Selective editing through brushed regions works differently than for Circles, Polygons, and Curves. Brushing allows you to create freehand brush strokes on your image and then apply image settings only to those strokes. This works great in conjunction with the other regions to create very smooth, seamless edits of your images. You might use a Polygon to select a large area of a background to brighten, then paint in small brush strokes around the borders of the background to ensure complete coverage.

To Create a Brushed Region, create or select an existing Layer, then select the Brushed Region cursor. Right-click inside the image to adjust the size and intensity of the brush you will paint with, then click and drag inside the image where you'd like to adjust your image.

Editing regions is just as easy as creating regions. First, you need to be in the same Region Cursor Mode as the region you want to edit.

You can delete a point on a Polygon or Curve region. Do this by following these steps:

You can move a point to a Polygon or Curve region. Do this by following these steps:

Select the region you want to delete in the Layer Popup Tool, and click the Delete button.

The effect of the adjustments you apply to a region will fade out from 100% effect inside the region to 0% outside the feather margin of the region. To have a smooth, gentle fade of your effect to allow it to blend in with the rest of the image, use a large feather size. To make sharp, crisp regions that only effect the selected area inside your region, use a very small feather margin.

You can use your mouse wheel to expand or shrink the feather margin of the currently selected region, or you can adjust the feather using the controls that will appear on the bottom of the Layer Manager.

You can right-click within a region and use the Layers Popup menu that appears to adjust the Feather or other aspects of your Region. For Circle, Polygon and Curve Regions, you will see this popup:

To invert a layer, select it from the Layer Tool, and toggle the invert button. An inverted layer will apply the image adjustments for that layer only outside the regions for that layer instead of only adjusting the inside of the regions.

Layer Opacity allows you to control the overall effect that a whole layer will have on your image: setting opacity of zero is the same as disabling a layer - this will not adjust your image at all - while a setting of 100 will have the full effect.

Region Blending allows you to "cut out" sections of a region by creating new regions below the initial region and setting the Blending to Subtractive. This will subtract the lower regions from any areas where they overlap with higher regions. A Subtractive region that does not overlap with Additive regions above it (as shown on the Layer Manager) will have no effect.

From the Regions and Layers toolbar in the Preview Panel, select the Layer that you would like to apply image adjustments to. Then any adjustments you make in the Tool Panel will apply only to the Layer that you have selected.

Some adjustments are designed to work only on the complete image and thus cannot be applied to a Layer. These include: