Selecting Rectangular Areas in Krita

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In some cases, specially when dealing with screenshots, we might want to select a perfectly rectangular area on the canvas.

To do that in Krita, we use the rectangular selection tool.

Krita's selection tools: rectangular, elliptical, polygonal, lasso, magic wand, similar color, Bézier curve, and magnetic curve.
Krita's selection tools, as seen in its toolbox.

All we need to do is to click on the pixel that will be one corner of the rectangle, and drag the mouse cursor with the button pressed until we reach the opposite corner.

Steps to use the rectangular selection tool in Krita: click, drag, and release.
Artwork by: Sharm via OpenGameArt.

Observations

Unfortunately, this is rather difficult to do in most applications, because in order to select a pixel precisely you're going to need to zoom in, but if the area is very large, you won't see the opposite side on your screen, so you can't drag all the way to there. In these cases, it's sometimes possible to make the the scrollbars scroll by dragging the mouse cursor toward the corner of the view. However, this is rather slow.

In Krita, and in most applications, if you release the mouse button after using a selection tool, it converts the shape you drew into a "selected area." This "selected area" isn't necessarily a rectangle or a circle, it's just information about which pixels are selected.

In GIMP, one thing that is generally clunky about it but that works in its favor in this case, is that if you release the button after drawing the rectangular area, the area isn't converted to a selection immediately. This means you can drag the corners of the rectangle to adjust it before you actually convert it into a "selected area." Notably, this means you can click on the pixel on the top-left corner of the area you want to select, zoom out, drag the bottom-right corner of the rectangle, and then zoom in again to adjust it precisely.

One workaround in other applications would be to display the rulers on the canvas, and drag them to create guides, and then hope that snapping works.

If you're working a lot with selections, GIMP is generally the better tool compared to Krita.

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