You can do it, and more easily than you might think, by editing images in a ClarisDraw paint frame! All you need are two pictures, and you are all set.

This information was provided by Claris Corporation on 16 March 1998, and incorporated into Apple Computer's Tech Info Library.

Want a picture of yourself standing atop Mount Everest? How about an image of a friend standing with George Washington? Want to put a moustache on the Mona Lisa?

Welcome to the world of image editing: the process of taking an existing "bitmapped" image and changing it. Image editing can provide impressive results. Many images you see in advertisements are edited in this way. It's not only a way to get some unlikely image, such as Abraham Lincoln standing next to a freeway, but it's also a way to enhance an existing image. You could eliminate a confusing background, for example, or brighten a cloudy sky.

Ever want to put someone on the moon? Follow the steps outlined here to take two pictures, one of a man and another of a moonscape, and combine them to form a new picture. By following this general procedure, you will be able to do similar edits for other bitmapped images.

The bit-mapped image
Bitmapped images are those which are made up of tiny dots, very much like the way photographs are printed in newspapers. Paint programs create bitmapped images, and scanning software can generally provide you with a file in this format as well. You can also get good bitmapped images from photo CD's. The ClarisDraw paint tools allow you to color, add, delete, and rearrange these dots in an infinite number of ways so that you can change the image in almost any way you want.

Not sure you are dealing with a bitmapped image? Here is a simple test: when placing an image into ClarisDraw, if you have a bitmapped image, you can you zoom in and see a pattern of dots or bits. You can compare this to an object-oriented graphic, which is made up of individual, mathematically defined objects as opposed to bits. Such an image, an EPS for example, won't display as a pattern of bits.

Finding the right image

A photo CD can be a good source for images, as can pictures available via various online services. If you have got an actual photograph or other picture you'd like to work with, then you'll need to scan the image. You can then save it as either a TIFF file or PICT; ClarisDraw supports either format.

You can also work with GIF files, such as those you download from an online service, but here are a few caveats: ClarisDraw can open only GIF files of the format 87a. The only way you'll know if your GIF file is this format or not is by attempting to open it. If you get a message that says, "The document file name "" is a version that is not compatible with the translator GIF" then your GIF file is not format 87a. You'll need to find a GIF utility to open this file and save it in some other format, such as PICT. There are many shareware GIF viewing utilities available on the online services.

Prepare for takeoff

Once you've got the images ready to go, you'll need to prepare ClarisDraw for your files. Working with bitmaps, as with any paint file, takes a lot of RAM. You'll probably need to allocate more RAM to ClarisDraw, as its default RAM allocation might not be enough. To do this, quit ClarisDraw, then click on the ClarisDraw icon and select Get Info from the File menu. Change the Preferred memory size to 3,000 for now. (For more information on doing this, see your Macintosh User's Guide.) If at any point you get any error message telling you there isn't enough memory to do what you want to do, then you'll need to increase the memory allocation for ClarisDraw even higher. As a general rule, to edit a single image, you'll need a memory allocation of at least 3000 K. If you are editing multiple images in a single document, as the steps here do, you'll need to allocate more memory to ClarisDraw.

Put a man on the moon

Once you've made any necessary adjustments to the memory allocation of ClarisDraw, you're ready to go. Here are the steps.

1. Open a new document in ClarisDraw.

2. Select Place File.... from the File menu. When prompted, select the file you'd like to edit. You'll see it open on your screen. If you'll be editing several pictures, you can select "Place File..." again and select your second picture and follow the instructions below.

3. Click your images one at a time and choose "Ungroup Picture" from the Arrange menu for each. You can now click an image once more and the paint tools will appear on the left side of the screen. You're ready to edit!

Steps 4-6 focus on creating the picture.

4. Use the zoom controls to see the image of the man better. This helps in making a more precise selection.

5. Using the lasso tool, select the image of the man by carefully outlining the exact shape of his image.

6. Choose Copy from the Edit menu to copy your selection to the Clipboard.

7. Bring the landscape of the moon into view, so that you can click on the region where the image on the Clipboard will "land."

8. Choose Paste from the Edit menu.

Note that at this point, the pasted image, in this case the man's image, is still selected. This means you can move it, or make changes to it (see notes below). If you'd like to have multiple copies of the man, for example, here is a shortcut you can try: Hold down the Option key as you drag the selected area. A copy of the selected area appears and you can drag this copy to another location.

Note: Once you click anywhere outside of the selected image, it becomes unselected, and it will be much more difficult to select again.

Making selections

In the example above, the lasso tool is used to select the image of the man. This is just one of the two ways to select portions, or regions, of your image. The other way is to use the selection rectangle, which, as its name implies, lets you select a rectangular-shaped portion of your drawing. Using this tool will select your object and any white (blank) space around it. If you want the white or blank space around the selection to be ignored, hold down the Command key as you draw a selection rectangle around the image or portion of the image you want. Using the Command key in this manner makes the selection rectangle "shrink" to the size and shape of the image you are drawing it around. Be sure to keep the Command key down until the selection box shrinks. Note: This command works only for selecting images sitting alone on white space.

Edit an image

Remember, you are working with tiny pixels of color here. Everything that you do revolves around editing these dots. You can basically do four things: move dots, delete dots, add dots, or change their color. In the above steps, the focus is on basically moving dots from one place to another. The other three things that can be done, deleting dots, adding dots, or changing their color are reserved for doctoring an image, improving the color or cleaning up the "noise" that may have come over when you copied, pasted or moved dots around. Doing any of these three things can make a world of difference in the image.

Image-editing tools

There are lots of other ways you can edit images or selected areas of images: you can use the resize, shear, distort or perspective tools to give your image a whole new look. To use these tools, make your image selection and select any of the above tools from the Paint menu. You can lighten or darken your image; you can blend its colors; you can change the location of an object. Give each effect a try, if you don't like what you see, immediately select "Undo" (Command-Z) from the Edit menu, and your image reverts to the way it was before you applied the effect.

Don't forget the painting tools

ClarisDraw also provides painting tools with which you can edit your image. They include the Pencil, for drawing lines one-pixel wide; the brush, for painting your image with color; the paint bucket, for filling in large areas; the spray can, for "spraying" wide areas with diffuse color; and the Eraser, for changing anything you've done back to white. Note that double-clicking the paintbrush and spray can tools provide you with options as to how they'll work. Double-clicking the pencil zooms your drawing to 800%, very handy for closeup work.

Two other tools help you manage colors. The magic wand tool allows you to select objects by color, which is helpful for selecting oddly-shaped or hard-to-select objects. The eyedropper tool lets you click on a color and have that color selected in the color palette, helpful for finding a color so you can edit it. To edit a color, double-click that color from the color palette.

Try a little experimentation with the paint tools. You can impress your friends with edited images that look almost perfect. It is up to you!

Tips

After diving into the world of image editing, you may want to keep a few things in mind:

- Any images that use paint frames will require more RAM for editing (and more disk space for storage).

- When pasting one image into another, you may have incompatible color palettes. There is no easy way within ClarisDraw to resolve this. The best thing to do is print the images, then scan them yourself. This will give both images consistent color palettes. Keep in mind, however, that this technique may cause a loss in fidelity.