Good news for Refine edge users! In latest Photoshop 15.5, this tool has been improvised and revamped as select and mask feature (Refine edge option is no longer available now). It’s much easier now to make selections of tricky areas such as hair, furs, etc with this new feature.
Let’s see how to use it. Below is sample raw file we will use:
We can start by making rough selection of model with any automatic selection tool or path at first. If you don’t want to do it, just turn on quick selection mode.
Go to: Select > Select and Mask
We will get tool bar at left side and properties options will appear at right side of screen with lots of adjustment options. Here for this image, we have selected On Overlay mode with 50% opacity and selected blue colored background.
Now, from left tool bar, use Refine brush tool to remove background from image. By using this tool, it automatically removes background with blur ness in hair maintained.
But there still appears white lines at edges. To remove it, you need to adjust edge detection values and for further refinement, one can enable Decontaminate Colors box in output settings. This removes any remaining red hue around the edges of your selection. This makes hair cutout look natural.
During this process, if accidentally any required areas are removed then we can recover this part by using lasso tool or quick selection tool from left tool bar.
After desired quality is matched, select your required output options from right properties panel. Here we have selected New Layer with Layer mask for non-destruction workflow.
Here is final outputs in different background colors:
