selecting color in portion of drawing?

at the risk of comparing totally different software, in TV Paint there are “magic” erasers that can erase certain colors in certain areas of the drawing and leaving other colors unaffected; very handy when working quickly with various colors to explore and refine drawings. i’ve found harmony 12 has some related functions, but it seems they’re not meant for selected/isolated PORTIONS of a drawing:

method 1) make the color current in the menu, then right-click > select strokes with current color, and then ALL uses of the color can be deleted in the drawing, but not from a selected, isolated area in the drawing, i think.

method 2) dial the color’s opacity to 0, but that affects EVERY use of the color “globally”, i think.

method 3) select/shift-click enough of the lines and then delete, which is a lot of selecting.

method 4) always use the sub layers. meh, always is a long time…

additionally, the bitmap nature (i guess) of TVP means that the ‘magic’ erasers can softly ‘knock back’ areas of the color, affecting its transparency and not deleting it in entirety, so a bit can be left remaining; very handy while constantly reworking a drawing and erasing the under color as needed. from what i can tell from harmony 12 thus far, vectors require a solid eraser tool, not soft/gradated; when the latter tool is chosen, the vector line erases only temporarily, then re-appears, requiring a solid, non-gradated eraser setting.

thanks,

C

Hi Charlie,

I am not sure if you are aware of this function yet or not.
Harmony Advanced and Harmony Premium have a function called Protect Colour. If you select a swatch in the Colour view and right-click on it, you can lock it. Erasers, Repaint Brush, and Paint bucket won’t affect it.

http://docs.toonboom.com/help/harmony-14/premium/colour/protect-colour.html?Highlight=protect%20colour

Would that be closer to what you are looking for?

Marie-Eve

Thanks Marie-Eve-
that will be a helpful tool.
on related notes:

a) is there yet a way to erase a geometric or polyline shape, resulting in clean and/or straight edges, as opposed to the sketchy erasing possible with the eraser tool? if not, it would be very useful to have ‘eraser’ modes for those tools.

b) is there a way to crop a file as in photoshop/TVPaint, so the art remains at its original size?

Hey Charlie

If I understand your questions correctly:

a) One way you can achieve this for either the brush or pencil tool (geometrical and polyline tool uses pencil lines) is to use the cutter tool. This will allow you to either lasso around a section that you wish to move/rotate/scale/skew or remove altogether by deleting the section. Another way is to strike through the shape that you wish to remove. See the example below, this explains the functionnality of the cutter tool for storyboard pro, which is the same as in Harmony:

http://learn.toonboom.com/modules/drawing-and-colour/topic/cutting?c=1

b) How do you mean? Exporting from photoshop, if you have it set as the correct format (ex. 1920 x 1080) you should be able to bring it in and keep those proportions if your scene is also 1920 x 1080. If your scene hasn’t been set up this way, you can change it from the Scene top menu and then go to Scene Settings to change the resolution.

oh yes, i forget about the marquee cutter; that’s great for straight edges.

my question about the cropping needs clarifying.

example: i set up a TBH file of ‘x’ dimensions, then i create art that is a much smaller ‘y’ dimension, leaving lots of extra/unused ‘x’ around the sides. in some art programs there is a crop tool that allows one to drag around ‘y’ and creating a new file, with all the same project layers and attributes, that is trimmed close to the ‘y’ art, omitting the extra ‘x’ around it, and doesn’t resize the ‘y’ art; it still is at the orig ‘y’ size. that make more sense? besides the photoshop cropping tool, i think photoshop also allows one to resize the canvas without resizing art, which produces similar results.

also typing in numerical dimensions, and locking aspect ratios is super handy in marquee tools; is that ever discussed in feature lists?

Ah! I get your meaning. Unfortunatly, such a feature is not available. You would need to resize the scene settings or grab a camera and manually size it to fit your drawing.

I don’t believe it has already been suggested in the features list but perhaps you could add it in there. :slight_smile: Numerical dimantions could be more difficult since it is a vector software and the dimensions are always relative to how big you want your project to be. But feel free to put it in for the devs, you never know what they can cook up!