About Selection Objects

When compositing or working in Paint, you will want to make changes to one part of your image without affecting anything else. You do this by selecting the portion of the image that you want to change. Once you make a selection, it becomes a selection object.

Use selection objects to temporarily isolate specific areas of your workspace. You can paint on, or apply an effect to, the selected area of a clip without affecting the rest of the clip. Selections, however, differ from masks in that selections do not necessarily affect a layer's opacity.

Selection objects are similar to the Paint objects you create using the Paint tools. You can move, rotate, scale, and change object properties or stacking order just like you would for Paint objects.

This means you can animate a selection over the course of a clip so that the selection remains on top of the selected area of the image.