hi i'm robin whalley welcome to lenscraft in last week's video i demonstrated how to use
the quic kmask tool to refine a selection this week i want to show you the refine selection
tool which you can use when the quick mask method isn't working well enough as before i'll be using
affinity photo but again you'll also find similar tools in photoshop let's look at
this example image where i want to select the sky but not the trees and hillside when i try
to use the selection brush like in the previous video i find i can't make a good enough selection
look at the areas where you can see the sky between the leaves
the selection brush can't select these unless i click on each individual area
a better alternative is to use the flood select tool this has a contiguous option
in the toolbar which i can turn off and on when it's turned off it will select the sky
between the leaves but unfortunately it then selects other areas that i don't want it to
but we can improve this selection performance by reducing the tolerance and using the flood
select in the add mode by making a few selections in the sky we can achieve a
reasonable selection overall although it still isn't accurate in a lot of areas
if i turn on the quick mask you can see quickly some of the problem areas this is when using the
refine selection tools can help i can access the tools by clicking the refine button in the
context sensitive toolbar but you can also use the select menu and choose refine edges by default the
refine selection shows a red overlay covering the areas you haven't selected using this overlay i
can already see some problem areas but if i switch to the black matte option these are more obvious
now i can see quite a few selection problems that we need to fix using the refine selection tools
the first thing to realize that a lot of people miss is that these default settings are
already working on the selection if i click apply now it will apply these but if i click cancel i'll
return to the original selection a common mistake is to open the dialog and think the selection is
fine and so then click cancel now what you're seeing is the selection i made originally with
the default settings in refine selection applied to it the first of these is the matte edges option
this helps the software to identify and follow edges which is important if you're editing a
photo with a lot of fine detail the other setting is the border width which is currently set to
10 by default if i make this wider it expands the area where affinity is checking for edges
you can see this as a thick border around the edges of the selection when i move the slider
it can be tempting to increase this but then affinity starts to detect edges where you don't
want it to usually i find that it's better to make an accurate selection first before using
refine selection tools then in refine selection i can reduce the border width setting rather
than increasing it usually a narrow border width helps to improve an already accurate selection
the other slider we can use to fine tune the selection is the ramp slider this can
soften or sharpen the transition between selected and unselected areas as well as
expanding and contracting them watch what happens when i move the slider to the right
the selection becomes vague and soft but if i move the slider to the left it becomes better defined
by making these simple adjustments i've improved the accuracy of the selection overall and fixed
a lot of the problems so far the adjustments we've made to the selection have been global
but it's also possible to make localized improvements to fix the remaining problems
i can do this using the adjustment brush in the lower section of the dialog i'll start by using
the brush to paint the background affinity calls the unselected area of the image the background
so i can use this mode to paint over areas that i don't want to select when i paint over and then
release the mouse button affinity uses the new information from the adjustment brush to improve
the selection now i'm going to switch back to the red overlay because it makes it easier to see
what's happening along edges of the selection over on the left of the image i can see an area where
the distant hill wasn't selected ideally i want the selection here to expand down to the tree line
to fix this i can switch to using the foreground mode with the adjustment brush
watch carefully what happens as i paint over this area and then release the mouse button
notice that even though i didn't paint over the trees the selection expanded to meet
them finally i'm going to switch back to the black mat to check some of the fine details
here i can see that some of the branches and the gaps between the leaves
weren't selected quite as cleanly as i'd like them to
i can fix this using the matte option with the adjustment brush and then paint around these areas
using the matte option with the brush causes affinity to refine the selection edges
in that area this is usually sufficient to allow affinity to clean up the selection
as you do this you may find that you need to vary the brush size and paint over the area a couple of
times
when i finish refining the selection i can apply the changes once the matching ants
appear again i'll check around the image to make sure there aren't any problems that i've missed
finally i'll switch to the channel studio panel and save the selection as a mask for future use
both this refined selection and the quick mask video from last week are just a couple of the
topics i cover in my upcoming book called affinity how to the book will be available
from january and if you want to know when it's launched sign up for the newsletter on my website
i'll add a link to the page in the youtube video description i hope you found today's video helpful
i'm robin whalley you've been watching lenscraft i'll see you soon for another
video