Teach_Yourself_Photoshop_Elements_2

ADVANCED IMAGE EDITING SKILLS

T

he trouble with regular selection tools is that they

act like a switch. Pixels are either selected or

they’re not, and this produces unnatural transi-

tions and edge effects. What you need is a subtler,

more intelligent tool to automatically identify the areas you

want to keep and separate them from an unwanted back-

ground, while creating a smooth and natural-looking

boundary around even the most complex and finely-divided

details. That’s what the Refine Selection Brush is designed to

do. It was introduced with Elements 13 but it’s been enhanced

in Elements 14 and it’s a useful alternative to the Refine Edge

dialog. The Refine Selection Brush tool is designed to

improve a selection you’ve already made – it’s not designed

for making selections from scratch. In our example, we’ve

started off with the Quick Selection tool and then used the

Refine Selection Brush to get a much better result

Refine selection edges

Elements 13 brought a new Refine Selection Brush, and in

Elements 14 it’as been enhanced to cope better with tricky

outlines like hair and fur

4

Finishing touches

When you’re done, switch back to the Quick Selection

tool (or any other) to commit to a final selection and

and drag the cutout image onto the new background. To blend

in any remaining rough edges, we’ve used the Eraser tool set

to a large, soft brush size and an opacity of around 35%.

3

Refine the edges

You can also move the mouse pointer over the back-

ground to ‘push’ back the selection if you need to. And

if you move the pointer over the boundary, it changes to ‘edge’

mode, and you can paint along the edges of finer details to

produce a much subtler blend, especially for hair and fur.

2

Add to your selection

This tool has different modes – we’re going to use the

‘Push’ mode, and we want to ‘push’ the selection out-

wards to select more of the goat’s fur. The darker centre disc

marks the areas you definitely want while the outer grey area

is where Elements automatically selects and blends details.

1

Choose a background colour

The Refine Selection Brush is on the same toolbar fly-

out as the Quick Selection Brush and Magic Wand tool

When you refine the selection, the background is shown as

red by default, but we will choose black because it’s closest to

the new image we want to use as a background.

GET THE START FILES HERE: http://bit.ly/type-files