Shades help - Area mode

Area mode

Area mode is entered after pressing either its toolbar button or A and allows you to create rectangular "areas" (hence the name) which determine where will be special colors cleaned. You specify the first point by clicking mouse once, then move to the other corner and click again.

This behaviour can be changed in options to the widely used drag-and-drop method. Still, that won't allow you to zoom or change the shown part by scrollbars as you won't be able to let the mouse button off.

You can have as many areas as you want. There is always one area which is "selected" - you can delete it. This is indicated by area color: green = selected, blue = normal.

Toolbar

Let's now have a look at the toolbar used for area mode.

The first group could be called cleaning buttons. First one cleans (or processes) only the part of picture determined by areas. Shortcut key Enter. Second one is for fast cleaning of the whole picture - areas are omitted. Shortcut key CtrlA. Finally the third button cleans all special colors added in Simutrans version 99.09.1. This function is intended only for compatibility and may be removed in future, thus also no keyboard shortcut. The last button changes background color to the proper one. Shortcut key CtrlB. Be warned, it does not deal with fuzzy edges after aliasing, resizing etc., it just replaces the color found in upper left corner with background.

These two buttons cycle between areas, seleting one. If you want to select an area, it is usually faster to right-click it. The same function offer keyboard shortcuts Page Up and Page Down.

The first button deletes the currently selected area. Shortcut key Delete. The other one deletes all areas after pop-up confirmation. Shortcut key CtrlDelete.

Since there are two categories of special colors, you can here select which one(s) you want to clean (checked) and which to keep (unchecked).