Rectangular, Elliptical and Polygonal Selection Tools let you select area of image for further editing or adjustment. Add/substract new selection from old selection with Shift or Alt key pressed when drawing new selection. When deleting background, you can select and delete small areas one-by-one. You do not need to select whole background at once.

When doing portrait, use Paint Tool in Painter to emphasize the bright spots in eyes. Use background without outline (color fuchsia by default) for fill of bright spots in eyes and teeth to avoid placing of stitches on these places. Use background with outline (color lime by default) for fill of deleted areas around head.

Use Draw Line Tool or Draw Bezier Curve Tool to emphasize soft edges on image and make them more visible on final design. It is often desirable to emphasize edges of shirt collar, dark line between lips, edges of studs, or whiskers when doing portrait of an animal. When drawing Bezier curve, use double Click to finish curve in Foreground Color or right mouse click to finish curve in Background Color.

Select Zoom Tool and click left mouse button on image to zoom in and right button to zoom out the image.

Magnifying Lens shows enlarged detail of picture when mouse cursor moves over the picture. It serves for fine editing of picture. For example, when you digitize portrait and you want to paint several pixels to emphasize brightness in the eyes, Magnifying Lens helps you to place pixels precisely on the right place. On slower computer, the Magnifying Lens may slow down the mouse cursor movement. Therefore, you can turn off the Magnifying Lens in "View" menu.

Gamma Correction. If Gamma Correction is set to greater than zero, dark areas of image will become brighter (if Gamma Correction is set to lower than zero, dark areas of image will become even darker). This function is important for scanned images, because they are often too dark. This function does not affect highlights very much. Therefore, use it when you are satisfied with highlights and you only want to brighten dark areas of selection. If the whole selection is too dark and you want to distribute shades equally from black to white, use Equalize function from Painter/Adjust menu.  

Brightness, Contrast. Use these functions to improve look of whole image, its parts or selected colors. Thus, you can make eyebrows, mouth, nose or other parts of image more distinctive.  

When creating color design, the intensity and hue of image color may become important factor of design quality. Colors of scanned images may tend to blue or some other color. In such case, adjust Color Balance (by shifting colors more to yellow for example).

Intensity of image colors can be adjusted by Saturation value.

The meaning of "Do Not Affect Background Colors" check box is same as in Brightness Characteristics window.

Equalize Selection Based on Entire Image setting means that brightness values of whole image are redistributed, but only selected pixels are really changed. Thus, selected area is equalized in appropriate brightness range and not whole black-to-white range.

Equalize Selection Based on Selection setting means that brightness values of selected pixels are redistributed in whole black-to-white range.

Usually, it is desirable to not affect background colors by equalization, because Sfumato Stitch would not recognize them if they change. Therefore, "Do Not Affect Background Colors" check box is checked by default.

The below picture shows the equalization effect on dark hair.

Use functions from this menu to select/deselect parts of image and invert selection.

Select Color Range serves for selection of desired colors in order to edit them all at once.

You can make new selection leaving the previous selection still active and thus you can select just subset of previously selected areas.

Deselect 1/2 of Pixels and Deselect 3/4 of Pixels serve for creation of color blending on Color Map. It is assumed that some compact area is selected, then 1/2 or 3/4 of pixels is deselected and remaining pixels are filled with other color.