Marching Ants

Marching ant effect is an animated technique in Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro or GIMP that is identified by a moving dotted line border along a selected image. Marching ant technique is also known as marquee selection. Since the moving dotted line looks like a number of ants marching along the border, hence, the name marching ants was given. The marching ant effect helps the user identify the selected image by animating the border.

The marching ant technique was developed by Bill Atkinson and was first implemented on Mac Paint formerly known as Mac Sketch. Bill Atkinson developed this technique in the year 1983 when he was trying to add more tools to the palette of Mac Sketch, the graphic application software of Macintosh. He was successful in adding a lot of tools to the software like, a rectangular selection tool and paint bucket tool. He wanted to develop a selection program. Bill Atkinson got his inspiration of developing the selection program of the marching ant technique from a Hamm’s Beer Sign board at an old beer and hamburger joint in Los Gatos. The signboard featured an animated waterfall and Bill realized that an animated border similar to this technique could solve the problem, as it would be easier to identify the selected image with the animated border no matter what the background was. Bill Atkinson then developed an animation by using alternating sequence of patterns of black and white, which looked like ants marching around the selected image.

Marching ant technique is very useful when the user has to change or provide a different effect to one or more images in the picture. It identifies this image and with the help of other tools the user can change or alter the appearance of a selected image without disturbing the background of the original image. With the help of the marching ant technique one can alter, create, manipulate and enhance digital image files including photographs, computer generated images and scanned images.