Photoshop - Fine Tuning Selections

Photoshop provides many methods for fine tuning your selections. Whether you use the marquee tools, the quick selection tool, or the magic wand tool, you can fine tune your selections using the refine edge tool.

There is a very visible difference in how the tool options appear in versions CS4 and CS5 but the choices you are making are basically the same, the difference being in presentation. When you choose the refine edge tool, it produces its own pop out menu with the set of options it offers.

The CS4 version offers a ‘preview’ check box which has been omitted in version 5. I can only imagine that version 5 assumes if you have chosen the refine edge tool, you definitely want to see a preview. Version 4 shows four display options at the bottom of the pop out menu in the form of colored icons. Version 5 offers these same options with its first selection window, ‘View Mode’. Both let you choose to see your selection with the ‘marching ants’ selection boundary, against a quick mask (scarlet) overlay, against white or black background. Version 5 additionally provides a new layer view which shows your selection as a new layer which you can save as output.

All of these viewing options help you distinguish your selection and especially appreciate the tuning you are about to do! You can cycle through these settings simply entering the key ‘f’. This makes it very easy to compare these different backdrops, compare the different highlights while focusing on your image and not the menu options.

Options radius and contrast work together balancing their separate adjustments. Photoshop tells you that increasing the radius helps improve your selection edge in areas of soft transition. This would be a ‘fine tuning’ area between your choice and the part of your image outside. Using contrast restores some of the color removed from your choice, restores some of the crispness that your ‘radius’ adjustment removed.

Smoothing will also soften your selection edge and help blend the transition between your choice and area outside. Cycling through the display options is really helpful to appreciate your adjustments. In a very real sense there is a trade off between smoothing your selection and actually changing your image.

Removing jagged edges provides a soft transition in your selection but the tools that soften add or remove detail and color in the process. The different display modes makes this much easier to see. Both CS4 and CS5 versions provide a ‘feather’ and ‘contract/expand’ adjustment but in version 5 the contract/expand is labeled ‘shift edge’. This is what you are doing when you expand your selection boundary and this adjustment provides that helpful control.

To me, ‘feathering’ is closer than any of the adjustments to actually adding to your design. Because feathering softens both sides of your boundary, you are adding an effect as much as sharpening your selection.

The refine edge tool is just that: you are defining a refinement process then fine tuning that refinement… so applying then removing an adjustment, cycling through the different display options will provide the best method for deciding on what ‘refinement’… works best for you!