Selection Highlight Color

[Xiaoth]

I think superimposing a transparent highlight color was a bad design idea. It does look cool and it helps you see what you've selected. But at the same time it "defaces" the image you're trying to edit, making it difficult to know for certain that your color-related edits (i.e. applying color filters to your selection) is accurate, at least not without clicking out to get a clean preview and then going back to your history list to undo the deselect... what a PITA.

At minimum, selection highlighting should be togglable for the user to turn off using either a toggleable menu item or a checkbox in an Options dialogue. Alternatively, you could make the highlighting appear when the mouse hovers over the area. But if you do this, you should detect mouse hover even if an effect window is still open, assuming the effect window offers a non-closing "Apply" or "Preview" button.

[Rick Brewster]

I disagree that it was a bad design decision, but I agree that it makes certain things more difficult. The main motivation behind the selectiong "tinting," as it has become to be known, is that when using the lasso it is not very intuitive which areas of the image are selected when you have a selection path that criss-crosses itself. Having selection "tinting" was something of a lesser-of-two-evils type decision.

We're aware of all these factors are looking into making this better for v2.2.

[Rick Brewster]

This is what I've come up with, and I think it will work well:

* When a selection tool is active, the selected pixels will be tinted. This will enable the user to be able to tell which pixels are selected and which are not.

* When any other type of tool is active, the selected pixels will not be tinted.

* When transforming the selected pixels (scaling, rotation, translation), the outline will not be drawn. The outline will of course be drawn while transforming just the selection.