Zoner Photo Studio 12 Professional Edition

Zoner Photo Studio helps you take control of your photos. Acquire pictures from your camera, organize your archive, and edit and share your photos—it’s never been easier!

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• Editing photos
• Removing picture defects
• Retouching tools
• Transforming and converting photos
• Creative tools
• Selections and layers
• Special graphic tools
• Batch Processing
• Other tools

Work with Selections and layers

Advanced work with digital photos requires the ability not just to edit a whole picture, but also select parts of it and apply edits to those parts only. In highly advanced photo processing, work with selections is supplemented by work with a mask. This enables fine control over how each edit is blended into the original picture.

Making Selections

If a picture contains a selection, then all enhancements, effects, and tools affect only the area within it. To ensure a smooth transition between the edited part of a picture and the rest of it, you can blur the edges of a selection. If multiple parts of a picture are selected, then each part can have its own individual blurring. Selections can be added together, subtracted and otherwise combined, and the edge of the selection is editable (blurring and more). The selection can be given a border and a fill. Selections can be saved and loaded back in.

Zoner Photo Studio offers the following selection tools:

• rectangular selection,
• elliptical selection,
• lasso—freehand-draw an enclosure around an area to select it,
• polygonal lasso—draw a series of lines enclosing an area to select it,
• magnetic lasso—this works similarly to the polygonal lasso, but it detects and magnetically sticks to the edges of objects in a photo,
• magic wand—click a spot to select the surrounding area with a similar color (for easily selecting e.g. the sky),
• brush selection—brush on the selection using a paintbrush with a size of your choice.

Material in selections can be cut, copied, and pasted within a picture and between pictures, and transformed (resized, skewed, etc.) during pasting. Pasted areas can also receive a shadow.

Work with the Editing Layer

The Editing Layer is a selection mask. Using a mask during graphics editing is an advanced technique that makes work more precise and enables special effects. For mask creation, Zoner Photo Studio uses a temporary layer where the mask can be edited. This enables very precise application of effects with definable opacity and blurring. Unlike normal selections, work with the mask remains active until the temporary layer is merged with the original picture, and until then, mask settings can be edited at any time. The area under the mask can be made colored for easier visibility.