Highlight part of the picture

When you are talking about one button or one line of code, the rest of the screen competes for the viewer's eye. Rooster can light a rectangle of the picture and dim everything around it, so the viewer looks where you are pointing.

Highlight a region on the canvas

1. Click the recording, or any picture layer, on the canvas.
2. On the toolbar over it, open Effects and choose Highlight Region.
3. Drag a rectangle over what you want seen. Everything outside it goes dark as soon as you let go, and the rectangle stays selected.

To move a highlight, drag it; to resize it, drag one of its handles. Press Delete to remove the selected highlight - the clip stays - and Escape to deselect it. Press Escape before you drag to give up drawing one.

Highlight a region from the Adjust rail

1. Click the recording, or any picture layer, on the timeline.
2. Open the Adjust rail and find Highlights.
3. Press the +. A highlight appears in the middle of the picture.
4. Set Left, Top, Width and Height - each a percentage of the picture, from its top-left corner - to frame what you want seen.
5. Set Strength to how dark the rest of the picture goes: 60 % to begin with, 100 % for black. Press Return or move to the next field to apply it.

How the highlight works

The dim is drawn on the recording's own picture, so the lit window stays on the same part of the screen when you zoom in, crop or move the layer, and the exported file is dimmed exactly as the preview is.

Several highlights on one clip light several windows under one dim, and the strongest Strength among them sets how dark the rest goes. A clip can carry up to eight regions. On your recording, a highlight covers the whole scene, or the whole video when Apply to says all scenes; on any other layer it covers that clip.

Your recording is not changed: the highlight is an edit, like a cut. One Undo (⌘Z) takes back each change, and the bin beside a region removes it. Rooster no longer blurs part of the picture: see what happened to Blur Region.