Hi! Welcome back to the Photoshop Training Channel.
I'm Jesus Ramirez.
In this tutorial, I'm going to show you two
little-known filters to remove white edges or fringes from your cut-outs in Photoshop.
Fringing, the white edges or halos around your selections, can be very distracting and
they could ruin a good composite. In this video, I'm going to show you two filters
designed specifically to work with masks and selections. They're quite powerful, and you
can use them to remove fringes from your cut-outs. The vast majority of Photoshop users aren't
aware that these filters exist, so I'm pretty sure that this video will show you new tools
and techniques to enhance your Photoshop masking skills.
We will work with three examples, and I will show you how you can apply these filters to
different situations and the advantages of using these filters over other methods or
similar tools. Okay, let's get started.
We're going to work with this file, and it contains a black background, and that's just
so that the white outline is easier to see in the tutorial.
And I'm going to start by making a selection. In older versions of Photoshop, you can just
use the quick selection tool to click and drag and select your subject. But in Photoshop
CC, you have the select subject button, which uses Adobe Sensei, Adobe's artificial intelligence,
and I can click on that, and Photoshop will select the main subject of my photo, and in
this case, it's obviously the hand. And it does a really good job selecting it.
Next, I'm going to go and click on the layer mask icon to create a layer mask.
And you will see that we have a really nice cut-out, but unfortunately, there's a white
edge, this white halo. That is called fringing, and there's a lot
of ways of removing it in Photoshop. But not a lot of people know about two filters
designed to work with masks in Photoshop. I haven't seen many people use it, so if you
haven't seen this technique, please let me know in the comments, and if you like it,
click on that like button. But anyway. Make sure that your layer mask
is selected. This white outline is known as the focus.
Make sure that it's over the layer mask thumbnail.
Then go into Filter, Other,
and you'll see two filters that you probably have never used before.
Maximum and Minimum.
We'll start with Maximum.
That brings up the Maximum window,
and you have a preview of the mask here.
You can zoom out, zoom in, and obviously you can see what happens on the actual canvas
because we have preview enabled. You can click on that checkbox, or you can
press the P key on the keyboard to disable and enable the preview.
And what the Maximum filter is doing, is expanding the mask. But it does it in a much better
way than other tools in Photoshop. I can click the radius slider to the right,
in this case, 15 pixels, and that expands the mask 15 pixels.
But notice what good job Photoshop does here
at the bottom in maintaining
the shape of the mask.
See that?
See the creases of the hand? They're still visible right on the mask, which is great.
You also have two algorithms of how the expansion is applied. Let me increase it a little bit
more, and you'll be able to see it better. Currently, the algorithm is set to squareness,
so that's going to give you a lot of straight edges.
In something organic like a hand, a better option would be roundness
and notice the difference.
Notice how we have a more rounded mask.
In this case, I don't really want to expand my mask.
Instead, I want to contract it.
So I'm going to go into Filter, Other, Minimum,
and the default is one pixel. Preserve is set to Squareness, but I'm going
to change it to roundness, just because I think it'll give me a better result.
And notice that with the default setting of one, we already lost the fringing.
And the great thing about this filter is that we're not forced to use whole numbers like
we are with expand or contract under the select menu.
We can actually use decimals, which gives us more control.
And I can use the up and down arrow keys on the keyboard to adjust the value in the input
box, and fine-tune the contraction of my mask. Also, something I didn't mention earlier,
if I make a extreme adjustment, you'll be able to see how the mask is also affected
here in the layers panel. So you can see that we're, in reality, affecting the mask.
So I'm going to just leave this at about
one pixel, and I think that will do a good job of removing the fringing off this hand.
Once I Press OK, Photoshop will apply that adjustment to the layer mask.
One the advantages of using Minimum to remove fringing is that it works just like any other
filter, which means that you can apply it to a selection.
Let me show you what I mean by that. In this example, I've already done a pretty
good job at masking out this runner. But I noticed that I missed a spot right here,
this area here. So I can easily make a selection using the
polygonal lasso tool, and just target this area with that filter.
So I'm just going to quickly select the area that I want to affect with the filter, and
if I go into filter, other, Minimum, notice what happens.
I'm actually affecting the actual layer. I didn't click on the layer mask thumbnail,
which is why I'm getting that effect there.
And I can increase the radius, and you'll see how it affect the actual pixels.
So I really don't want to do that, so I'm going to cancel.
So activate the mask by clicking on the layer mask thumbnail.
Make sure that the white outline is over the thumbnail.
Also, I don't want the marching ants distracting me, so I'm going to press Ctrl H, that's Command
H on the Mac, to hide the extras. You can also go into view and extras if you
want. I prefer using the keyboard shortcut, Ctrl H, Command H on the Mac.
So the selection is still there.
And if I go into Filter,
Other,
Minimum,
I can start adjusting the radius.
This is what it looks like with one pixel.
It's before and after. And I can keep increasing the radius until
that fringing goes away.
And we'll increase it to three to make sure
that we remove all those pieces, and Press OK.
Because of the selection that I made to target this area, we're having an issue here.
But that's really easy to fix with the brush tool.
I can set white as my foreground color, and I can just paint that area back in to fix
that issue there. As I said before, not a lot of people are
using these filters, and I think they're very powerful.
I haven't seen many tutorials on YouTube sharing this technique.
So if they're new to you and you think that they will help you out, click on that like
button now. In this example, we have a soccer ball.
The right side of the soccer ball is in focus, and the left-hand side is out of focus.
So if we wanted to select the soccer ball, I would have to create an elliptical marquee
around the soccer ball, and I'll do that really quickly.
I'm just going to click and drag, and try to match the shape of the soccer ball as best
as possible. And you can use the space bar as you create
a selection to move it around, so that's what I'm doing.
I'm holding the space bar, clicking and dragging it to move it around. And I'm going to try
to match it as best as I can. And for this tutorial, it is not necessary
to get a perfect selection, so we'll just say that this is good enough.
With the selection active, I can just click on the layer mask icon to create a layer mask.
The background is black. That way the cut-out is easy to see.
And with something like this, where you have a sharp edge on one side and a blurry edge
on the other, you would need to blur the mask to make it look more realistic.
So you can use something like the blur tool and just blur the edge of the soccer ball.
And I'm really blurring the mask. So I'm going to hold Alt, Option on the Mac
and click on the layer mask so that we can actually see it.
So when I click and drag, you will see how that edge of the mask is getting blurrier.
And it's going to look much, much better than the sharp edge that we had before.
So once I blur that with the Blur Tool, I'm going to hold Alt and click on the layer mask
thumbnail once again to bring back the layer, and you can see how that looks much better.
Now, before we move forward with the filters, I want to show you one thing.
I'm going to click on Select and Mask, and I'm going to change the view to black and
white so that we can see the mask. Then I'm going to shift the edge inwards as
much as I can, and I'm going to zoom into the edge.
Notice how the edges become jaggy on both sides?
If I shift the edge to positive 100, the same thing happens, the edges are jaggy on both
sides of the ball, as you can see there.
So I'm going to cancel that.
And I'm going to fit the image to screen.
Then I'm going to hold Alt, Option on the Mac, and click on the layer mask thumbnail so that I could see it.
I have my focus around the layer mask.
Then I'm going to go into Filter,
Other,
Minimum,
and I'm just going to make that really, really small.
Something like that.
And I'm going to Press OK.
So now, the selection is much smaller.
But if I zoom in, you can see that the edges are still nice and smooth
and I didn't create any jaggedness.
And by the way, I'm panning by holding the space bar and clicking-and-dragging.
And on the other side, you will see that everything
is still smooth. I'm going to fit the image to screen, and everything looks great.
I can go back into Filter,
Other,
this time I'm going to go into Maximum,
and I'm going to make that larger. So I'm going to just make that larger, about 32 pixels.
I'm going to set it to "Roundness," so that
we have a round selection. And Press OK. And notice that, again, we were
able to maintain the smoothness on one side and the sharp edge on the other.
I'm going to fit that to screen, hold Alt, Option on the Mac, and click on the layer
mask thumbnail. And you will see the great job that Photoshop
did in both expanding the selection and contracting the selection.
What I'm going to do now is simply press Ctrl, Command on the Mac.
And click on the layer mask thumbnail to create a selection out of that layer mask.
And I'm going to delete it. So it's like we're just starting from scratch.
We just have a selection. And when you have a selection active, you
can edit the selection by pressing the Q key on the keyboard to enter the Quick Mask mode.
The Quick Mask mode will apply a red overlay to the areas that are not selected. In other
words, the areas that are going to be hidden. And from here you can use something like the
brush tool to paint in areas that you want to select or deselect.
You will, of course, use black and white. But the reason that I'm showing you this,
is to show you that you can go into the filter menu, and you can go into other, Maximum and
I can adjust the selection by using these filters with the Quick Mask mode,
then Pressing OK.
Pressing the Q key to bring back the selection
and there it is, and if I click onto create a layer mask, I created a layer mask using
that selection that was edited with the Maximum filter.
And before we finish the tutorial, I quickly want to show you what those filters do when
you apply them to a regular pixel layer. For example with the Minimum filter, you can
set preserve to roundness and get this really interesting Bokeh style effect.
There's obviously better ways of doing it, but this is what the filter does on an actual
layer and not a layer mask. And if I change this to squareness, you can
see the different effect. So this filter could also generate some very
interesting artistic effects. So were these filters new to you? Let me know
in the comments. Also, if you think that these filters will
help you out in your projects, then click on that like button now.
If you want to learn more about masking and cut-outs, then I recommend watching these two videos.
My Select and Mask Crash Course, which teaches
everything about the select and mask workspace,
and my tutorial on Making Smooth Cut-outs
Using Vector Masks. Also, I have a playlist that currently has
13 videos on masking and selections. Basically, everything that you want to know
about making good cut-outs. I'll place all three links right below in
the description so that you can watch them right after this tutorial.
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Thank you so much for watching,
and I will talk to you again in the next video.