The selection tools are good, but masks provide a whole new set of options for creating and editing selections. This chapter demonstrates how the GIMP's painting tools, gradients, and filters can be used with masks to get selection results that would be impossible with the selection tools alone. Masks are complementary to the selection tools, and this chapter shows how the two can be used together to produce the most effective results. In addition to the new capabilities for editing and creating selections that masks provide, they also have another very useful feature. A mask can be stored and used more than once.
Selections created with the selection tools are more ephemeral.
When created, they exist only until another selection is made or until they are canceled. Moreover, while a selection is present in the image window, it only allows operations to be applied to the pixels in the selected region. This means that active selections can impede the work flow because pixels outside the selected region cannot be processed. Thus, there is a need for selections that can be stored and reused. Masks provide this capability, and, as will be seen shortly, it is easy to convert selections to masks and vice versa.