About those marching ants

As I am fine tuning a selection, using the square or circle select tool to either add or subtract from the selection, the marching ants which show the selection outline I’m adding or subtracting, only appear during that process when I am selecting something outside of the current selected area. I hope that makes sense. Is there any way to have the ants display the outline of what I am selecting to add or subtract, within the current selection? For example, say I have a large blob of a selection and I need to expand it slightly by a few pixels or so in one particular place. I might select the circle select tool to do this and begin the process by starting to draw that oval shape inside the current selected blob, expanding out to encompass those few pixels I need to add to the blob. Would it be possible to see the ants of that oval select tool inside that selected blob so I can easier see the selection shape I’m generating to add those extra pixels? This is something I used to have in another graphics app and it’s a huge help to being able to see what I’m selecting as I’m doing that.

I think I understand what you’re after. Let me try and restate it so that hopefully we’re on the same page:

When adding to a selection in Acorn, if you start your additional selection inside the existing selection, you don’t see an outline of what you’re new selection is going to be until the selection expands to a point to where new pixels are being selected.

Is that correct? And you’d like to see an outline of the selection tool even though it’d be showing already selected pixels?

-gus

Yes, that’s it. It also applies when removing pixels from outside the selection as well. This would help to visually see the size & location of the selection you’re attempting to make in that process. I wasn’t sure if there was a way to turn that on/off as an option, that I hadn’t yet stumbled across yet.

BTW, I’ve only been using Acorn about 2-3 weeks but find it to be an awesome app. Thanks for all your work on it.

scott

No problem. Make sure to check out Acorn 6, which we just released hours ago!

Yep- I got it right away. Thank You!

Re Acorn 6: I may have found a glitch while performing this same sort of fine tuning selections. First when zooming in the marching ants turn to what looks like a barber pole and lose all definition. It doesn’t happen every time and seems to happen more after 5 minutes or so of fine tuning a selection. Second, after that barber pole thing starts, after each add or subtract from the selection, I get the dreaded beach ball for 1-3 seconds. I’ve tried having no other applications open in case it’s a RAM issue but even with over 2GB RAM free this is still happening. I never once noticed it in Acorn 5 and have been performing this selection fine tuning on both versions.

Thanks for a great app!

I think I know what’s causing the slow downs to happen- and while it might not get fixed for 6.0.1, I’ll see what we can do after that. (Someone else reported this bug this morning as a matter of fact).

-gus