Refining Edges in Photoshop

Hi! My name is Rich Harrington and welcome to this tip on how to get more out of photo shop CS4. Today, we are going to take a look at refinements to the refine edge command as well as the masks panel which really opens up a lot of options when you want to make better masks.

Now, masks so use for all of sorts of things, making selections, hiding things etcetera but what I use them a lot for in photo shop CS4 is none destructive image adjustments. So, when you combine a mask with the adjustment layer, you can totally go after just an individual part of your photo and fix just that. So, I am going to show the image that is already mostly fixed and we will refine it and then we are going to do an image from scratch.

So this first photo here is a photo of Red Rock Canon out at Las Vegas, and as you might hear some of the noise around here, we are at Photo Shop world, which is the great chance people come together twice a year to learn all about Photo Shop and share techniques and we are here in Las Vegas. As is this picture out here in Las Vegas.

So, we refined this image here and we added several adjustments. So if you look at this, you see for example we put on a hue saturation adjustment layer and it is making little adjustments right here to that image. The cool thing in photo shop CS4 is that you actually have an adjustment panel, so instead to having the double click or come all the way up here to the image menu, you simply go right above the layers panel and right there you see which weak the saturation. I would like to make that layer just a little darker now, what I am doing there is getting the exact look that I want for that Red Rock.

Now, we go to the next layer here and you see we have done some the same things, making adjustments. And that sky up there is working pretty well but it is a little bit bright, well, if you select the mask that is on a layer now, you have the masks panel and this gives you total control, you can edit the mask without having throw it away and start all over again.

I can play with things like feathering, and as we drag the feather slider, you will see that the edges around the mask get a little softer. Even better is clicking the mask edge button, and this allows you to see just that transition zone. So we can play with the feathering if we want, we can contract it expand it etcetera.

Let us go and set this feather back to zero and click on mask sketch again and see there we have it, there is our nice tight edge. But we can go ahead and put a little contrast in, you could smooth out the corners, feather it a little bit so it is gradual and even contract it or expand it until we get the results we want. Click okay and the mask updates.

So, this is great, it really makes it easy to refine those selections that are save this layer masks. Now you are saying, “Oh, I do not use layer masks.” You need to start to use them, it is really simple. Let us switch to a new photo here for a second; I am going to go to this picture of a motorcycle. And I am looking at, it is nice but I want the red in the motorcycle to pop just a little bit.

So let us take a look at the couple of new features in CS4. The best way to select this red is to use the select color range command. It is a brand new option inside the color range dialog box that is new to CS4. That is the localized color clusters. Now, that sounds like a breakfast cereal, it is a huge long name, what it really means is, it is going to keep the color in tighter pockets.

So instead, if you did not use this and you selected red, and there is red over here in the picture, it would grab it as well. But now, it limits it to a much closer geographic area when you click. So I click on the red for the motorcycle bike and hold down the shift key and click or drag through and you see how it is picking up more of that red. We can play with the fuzziness if we need to and when we are satisfied, we click okay.

So now, we have got a great selection of the red in the motorcycle. What I want to do next is click on the adjustments panel and simply say, “Let us add

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