Years ago I had a program called Micrografx Picture Publisher 8. When I moved up to XP, Picture Publisher started having issues, and I found GIMP. There was one tool Picture Publisher had that I've never seen in any other program, and for making selections it was the most user-friendly tool I've ever used.

I don't remember the exact title, but it was basically a brush for selection. Like a paintbrush or pencil or marker preset, it was a brush tool that could use brush shapes AND tablet pressure for size. When using it, you would get the dashed circle pointer for the max size you set, then you would paint on your image, but instead of color and such, it would leave a trail of selection. This worked with the scrolling border type selection AND the red overlay. When doing digital painting and wanting to do some fine detail selection, it was the most natural thing to use that brush and just sweep the image with the same stroke technique I used for painting. I realize the lasso replaces that function, but IMO the lasso is clumsy and clunky compared to the brush.

I asked in a Blender forum if anyone has ever seen anything like it, and was met with the classic answer of "if you want it, why don't you write one"... Was thinking today, GIMP has the brushes, and it has selection, maybe there's a way to just modify a brush to select instead of output. That question is how I found this forum. SO, being a hobby artist and NOT a coder/programmer, is this something I should even bother looking into? Is this something where maybe I could just alter some scripts or would this require digging into source? Am I the only one who thinks this was a great selection tool, and I should just let it drop?

I can see your point about having a brush that 'paints' a selection. The 'red overlay' in Gimp is the "Quick Mask" (shift-Q toggles on and off). What is possible rather than paint with a brush on the quick mask is use the eraser tool. This has the benefit of not having to change the foreground colour to white or the brush type, although you can still change the eraser size with the square bracket keys. Don't know about tablet pressure for size, certainly not with my old wacom volito.

For that brush and eraser are equivalent and the effect depend from the grayness of the color used (only the luminosity of the color is used so chose variation from white to black allow to wotrk in the more intuitive way

If you use the black with the brush you add to the selection, if you do with the eraser you subtract, and vice versa with white

about the mask a important tip, its color and opacity are customizable (by right clicking on the quickmask icon on the bottom left corner of the image windows:
You will NOT want a red overlay when editing the selection of a image with many red, you always need a contrasting color for the mask...and in fact you may change its colors on the fly

Yes i would suggest the quickmask mode also.
There is also the foreground select tool which uses a brush type selection.
Partha has a Gimp - RGGJAN Fork that utilizes a very nice foreground select tool that selects within transparency.
Download it here
32 bit
http://www.partha.com/downloads/gimp-2. ... rggjan.exe
64 bit
http://www.partha.com/downloads/gimp-2. ... rggjan.exe

These are portables. Install them on a USB flash drive, or in any directory other than Program Files to avoid PATH variable problems.

A video of the tool in action -


There is also the GML Matting filter (Adobe 8bf though), so you need PSPI to use that tool.

I started off with Micrografx Picture Publisher 8 too and I remember that brush. Once you know how to use the Gimp selection tools though you won't need it.

Holy crap! I always wondered what was going on when I would accidentally paint on the quick mask. One of those tools I never used because I could get around it with regular selection tools, and I was in too much of a hurry to worry about learning. This is just awesome, and I will be trying it out a bit later. Thanks for all the quick responses! Helpful and informative, and I think this will work better than the old select brush once I get used to it!

It's also included with the current 2.8 rc1 build Rod. This is what SIOX should have been and am quite happy with it now. Not perfect (see attached), but no more rough fringe results when SIOX was included in 2.6x.

Lyle are you saying that 2.8 has that SIOX foreground tool? Did you do the petunia with that?

Exactly Molly. SIOX was part of 2.6 too, but, as you know, it stunk. They made a heck of a lot of improvements, and, as you see, the result nearly dropped my jaw. Much better then in 2.6. I remember that you had to paint much more precise with the RGGJAN Fork to get as good a result. All I did was do the outer selection, then sloppily colored the inner selection, it it was more then smart enough to do the rest. Very happy with this result. It needs some more tlc of course, but it's 1000 times more useful then the forground/background tool in 2.6x.

Is there a 2.8 build for windows yet (already compiled and ready to go)? I looked the other day and only found linux. Also, I just recently started playing with gimp paint studio again, will that work with 2.8?

I didn't think they would ever get that one working. I saw a vid on it a couple years ago and it looks so cool but then when I tried it, it sucked. I just might have to re-install that gimp 2.8 over in windows. woo hoo. How is it for removing background with someone with long hair? Have you tried that yet?

That was going to be my question Molly.
I would like to see how the new tool in Gimp RC works with hair, and fur also.

Windows version is here
https://sourceforge.net/projects/gimp-w ... e/download