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Convert Marquee to Path

by admin on 05/03/09 at 8:13 am

One of the most useful additions to Fireworks 8 is the Convert Marquee to Path function. If you have a bitmap with area of high contrast, you can use the magic wand to make your selection and then convert it to a vector shape. This is what we will be doing in this project.

Create a new document that is 500 pixels by 500 pixels and has a white background. Use ctrl-R to import the image named bowler-hat.jpg and ensure that the magnification is set to 100%. Select the magic wand and use the following settings:

Because the contrast is so high, we are able to use such a high tolerance. Click on an area of black pixels. We are trying to select all black pixels in the image, but even though the tolerance is so high, there may be some pixels that escaped. If there are, increase the magnification to 400% (or whatever you feel comfortable with) and select the lasso tool. Your stray pixels may look like this (circled in red):

While holding down shift, select the stray pixels with the lasso tool. Notice that when you hold down shift, a little plus sign appears next to the cursor to indicate that you will be adding to your selection. Conversely, if you hold down alt while selecting, a little minus sign appears next to the cursor to indicate that you will be removing pixels from your selection.

Continue adding/removing pixels with the lasso tool (or wand tool if possible), until you have all the black pixels selected. Also select the black pixels in the bowler hat. Your selection should look like this:

Here’s the good bit. Click on Select > Convert Marquee to Path, and your selection is converted to a vector path. You can now change the fill of the vector path to any colour you like. Select the pointer tool by pressing V and then change the fill to black. We need to get rid of the original photo too, but instead of deleting it from our document, simply hide it in case we need to refer to it in the future (click on the eye next to the bitmap in the layers palette). Your image is now a vector, which means that you can scale it without any degradation in its quality. Scale it down to half the size by clicking Modify > Transform > Numeric Transform (Scale = 50%).

Your vector image should look something like this.

We need a white background for the black text we are about to write. One way of doing this is to draw a rectangle and punch its shape out of our vector gentleman. The disadvantage of doing this is that if you change your mind about the dimensions of the rectangle or its position, you have to undo all your steps and start again. If you close your png file and then reopen it, the history is lost and undoing steps is not an option.

Another way to achieve what we want is to draw a white rectangle on top of the figure in your image and then write black text on top of that. This is what we will do. Draw a white rectangle 130 pixels wide by 30 pixels high and place it over the gent like this:

And then write your text on top of it. I used the Vibrocentric font and got the following:

For the ‘decoration’ at the bottom, draw a black rectangle 10 pixels by 16 pixels. Copy and paste it and move it to the right using the right arrow key until there is a 2 pixel gap between the two rectangles. With the right rectangle still selected, change the width to be 2 pixels.

For the new text I used a plain Tahoma font.

Using very simple techniques, you have achieved quite a striking effect.