From the course: Photoshop: Channels and Masks

The joy of automated refinement - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop: Channels and Masks

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The joy of automated refinement

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- Over the course of the last few movies, we've seen commands that help you generate selections, or if you prefer, masks, entirely from scratch. In other words, these commands help you guide Photoshop toward seeing the image in the same way you see it. But here's the thing, the best selection outline in the world, the most beautifully articulated mask that you might possibly render, is not necessarily going to perfectly composite one image layer against another. The most notorious bad actor goes by the name fringing, and by fringing I mean edge details from the old photographic background that don't match the new composited background. Smooth details such as fabric get the fringe, but so do tiny, wispy, filigree details like hair, only with hair, there are lots more details and so lots more fringing. Then they get these sticky, crinkly, crunchy edges. It's like French fried onions with these things, only without the nummy flavor. Helpfully, Photoshop devotes two of it's most powerful features to the task of automatically addressing these problems. One is Select and Mask, the other is Refine Edge. The Select and Mask command opens up an independent subprogram known as a workspace. It lets you create a selection if you like, as I'll show you, but better still it lets you refine the selection. To do this, you create a kind of target zone around the edges of a selection and tell Photoshop to analyze that zone within the context of neighboring layers. Then Photoshop does it's best to make the edges better, which it almost always does. Alternatively, you can avail yourself of a top-secret, behind-the-scenes, old-school command known as Refine Edge, which does pretty much everything the Select and Mask workspace does, but within the confines of a simple, non-modal dialog box, which a lot of people, including me, prefer. So in other words, two commands, same mission. Invoke either one and you get what I believe to be Adobe's best approximation of mind reading automation. That is to say it takes a rough selection outline or a roughly masked edge and it turns it into that smooth, perfect thing that you wanted in the first place, and honestly, what could be better than that?

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