On Wed, 7 Jul 2004, Theodore D. Sternberg wrote:

Imagine a picture of a person's face, but with a solid, closed, black, curve drawn over part of the face. Is there a semi-automated (e.g. like magic wand, but not like bezier or lasso where I have to trace the curve with my mouse) way to select the region inside that curve? (The curve is not an ellipse or rectangle; it can be quite convoluted but it doesn't intersect itself.)

You could first select just the curve with the magic wand ("select continuous regions") and then Select -> Save to channel. Then on the channel, select the inner area (with the magic wand again) and you have your selection.

On Thu, 8 Jul 2004, Theodore D. Sternberg wrote:

On Thu, 8 Jul 2004, Steve Stavropoulos wrote:

Imagine a picture of a person's face, but with a solid, closed, black, curve drawn over part of the face. Is there a semi-automated (e.g. like magic wand, but not like bezier or lasso where I have to trace the curve with my mouse) way to select the region inside that curve? (The curve is not an ellipse or rectangle; it can be quite convoluted but it doesn't intersect itself.)

You could first select just the curve with the magic wand ("select continuous regions") and then Select -> Save to channel. Then on the channel, select the inner area (with the magic wand again) and you have your selection.

Thank you! Unfortunately, the magic wand is unable to select the inner area; if I could have done that it would have solved my problem right there. Or is it something special about channels (I guess I don't understand why you advise me to save to a channel really...)?

When doing the last select you should have the channel selected in the channels dialog and NOT any layer of the image. You save the curve in a channel so you will be able to make any operation you want based on that selection. You can assume that a channel is a normal greyscale image.