In our last tutorial, we talked about the wonders of the new Lasso Tool. This time, we'll be discussing one of the newest and most powerful selection tools in the PhotoImpact arsenal: Color Range.

Like what its name implies, Color Range lets you make a selection based on the colors you specify. It creates a gradient selection mask based on a pixel's color similarity to the colors you specified in the Color Range dialog box.

Color Range uses two sampling methods when making a selection. The first, Sampled colors, uses an eyedropper tool to make color selections from an image. Similarity determines the colors that will be incorporated into the selection, so that the higher the similarity, the more colors are included. The second method, Standard, uses the image's highlight, midtone, and shadow to determine the color range automatically.