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STEP FOUR:

I noticed a small area near the right edge of his shirt that wasn’t selected. So, I zoomed in on this area (by pressing Command-+ [PC: Crtl-+] a couple times), made the brush smaller by pressing the Left Bracket ([) key, and painted in that area. Remember, the tool is automatically in Add mode, so it simply adds what I just painted on to the overall selection.

STEP FIVE:

The Quick Selection tool got a little overzealous in the bottom-left part of the photo (notice how I blamed the tool and not the user) and selected part of the background. No problem. Remember how I said the Quick Selection tool is always in Add mode? Well, you can temporarily put it into Subtract mode by pressing-and-holding the Option (PC: Alt) key. You’ll see the − (minus sign) symbol in the middle of your brush, which means that anything you paint will be removed from the current selection. Now, just paint over any areas that shouldn’t be selected.

STEP SIX:

It’s a good idea to try and get most of the subject selected here. Even if you have to zoom in and spend a couple of minutes with a smaller brush, you’ll be happy you did. Here, it also selected too much under his arm on the left, so I’ll put the tool in Subtract mode again and paint to remove this from the selection. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but you’ll want to have a good selection around the subject before you move on.

STEP SEVEN:

Okay, now that we have a pretty good selection around the subject, let’s move on to the really good stuff—Refine Edge. At first glance, your selection may look really good, but it’s definitely not great yet. Whenever you have a selection tool and a selection active in Photoshop, you’ll see the Refine Edge button (circled here) become available in the Options Bar. Go ahead and click on it to open the Refine Edge dialog.

STEP EIGHT:

At the top of the dialog, there’s a View setting. This lets you see how your selection looks on various backgrounds. I usually choose On Black or On White from the pop-up menu here. Most of the time, I pick the one that most resembles the brightness of the background I’m going to place the subject into. That way, I can get a good preview of how they’re going to fit. In this example, white will give us a really good preview of the edge we’re working with (since his clothes are darker than a pure white), so I’m going to choose On White.

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Tip: Experiment with Different Backgrounds

It’s always good to experiment with different background choices. If you usually choose black, then try switching to white once in a while. This way, you’ll get a worst-case preview of what your selection looks like and any problem areas you may have to watch out for later.

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STEP NINE:

You’ll see that our selection is looking kinda jagged at this point. Well, the star of this dialog is the Edge Detection section (new in CS5), and it’s going to help out a lot. Its job is to automatically figure out what areas you want to keep around the edges of your selection and what areas you want to get rid of. So, the first thing I do is increase the Radius setting. This gives Photoshop some information about how far out from the existing edges of the selection you want to look for things that may need to be selected. If you don’t have wispy hair or any stray details that are really far out of the original selection (like in this example), then you can get by with a low setting of around 10–15 pixels or so.

STEP 10:

Try turning on the Show Radius checkbox at the top of the dialog. This gives you a preview of the Radius setting, so you can fine-tune just how far you need to drag the Radius slider. If you still don’t see the edges of what you eventually want selected, then you need to keep increasing the Radius setting until you do. If not, Photoshop won’t look that far outside your original selection for any more details to select.

STEP 11:

Right now, I have the Radius set to 15 pixels. This means that