Selection with soft edges

[charborob]

I have been trying PL for a couple of weeks as an alternative to P'shop. Sometimes, I find myself lost in PL's functions. I found this forum helpful for answering specific questions that I had. Unfortunately, I could not find the answer to this question: how can I make a selection with soft edges?
Thanks for your help.

[gmhofmann]

Try this: Activate your selection tool and go to the dialogue "Tool settings". Type in your value in "Soft Edge" and crop your picture...

[charborob]

I tried your suggestion, but the selection edges are still sharp. I entered a value for a soft edge and drew my selection, but I noticed that the value returns to zero once the selection is done. If I first draw a selection and then insert a value for the soft edge, the edge remains sharp.

In PL's help, chapter 6.3.4, there is this line:
"Soft Edge adjusts the smoothness of the edge of a lasso. If the lasso is already filled, it will have no effect."

How do you then create an empty lasso?

Or maybe I am not using the correct tool to do what I would like to do. I need to select part of an image with a soft-edged selection and modify the brightness, or color, or whatever inside this selection. Pretty straightforward in P'shop, but I can't figure it out in PL.

[lutz]

Hello Charborob,

no problems over here on Win XP. The value does not return to zero, no need to create an empty lasso, etc..
Which PL version and which OS are you using? Perhaps you could attached a zipped example file?
Perhaps watch out that you are creating the selections on the correct layer.

[charborob]

Hi,
I am using version 14.51 UB on Mac OS 10.5.5. I just have the background layer.

I tried again and it works! I think the problem was that I had not hit "Enter" after typing a value for the soft edge. Silly error! I do need some adaptation to PL.

[Hoogo]

I'm not totally sure if we talk about the same thing, the PL-Terms are a bit different from PS:
-There are Lasso-tools (like Marquee in PS) to create these dotted lines, I don't know if there is a name other than "marching ants" in PS for that. In PL it's called lasso.
-There is something called "mask", that green area outside of the lasso.
-And there is the "selection", that odd thing that appears in the layer list when you move a lasso/mask together with its content. It behaves a bit like a layer.

I don't know if there is a way to smooth a selection. I think it's too late when you have created a selection by moving the lasso/mask with its content.
But you can smooth the mask before you turn the whole thing into a selection.

-Choose one of the lasso-tools.
-If there is already a lasso/mask when you create a new one or alter it, soft edge is preserved.
-If there is no mask/lasso, soft edge is reset to zero. But changing it afterways will smooth the edges.
-And after that you can turn the whole thing into a selection.

I'm using 14.90B11, it might be slightly different in the current normal version.