Photoshop Compositing Secrets - Matt Kloskowski [9]
STEP 12:
The rest of the dialog isn’t actually new to CS5—it’s been around for a while. The Smooth setting will smooth off any jagged edges, and most of the time, like now, I leave it set to 0 because I want all of the edges, like the hair on his arms and head. If the edges start to look too jagged, I’ll increase it to 5, maybe 10 at the most. The Feather setting makes the edges blurry or soft. Typically, you don’t want an extremely crisp edge no matter what the subject is. So, feathering has always been a selection trick we used to make things look more realistic, but it doesn’t have much of a place anymore. The Radius (and Smart Radius) settings work much better. But, I usually set Feather to a really small setting, like 0.3 pixels, anyway, just to soften the edge a tiny bit.
STEP 13:
Contrast firms up any soft edges. It’s typically not something we’ll use for extracting people, though, because the Radius setting gives us such a good result. The Shift Edge setting tells Photoshop to shift the entire selection inward or outward depending on which way you move the slider. Again, we’ve done our work already, so you generally don’t need to move the selection edge at this point. Decontaminate Colors is only used when you have your subject on a colored background. We’ll talk more about what color to photograph people on later in this chapter, so for now just leave it turned off.
STEP 14:
When you’re done with your selection and ready to move on, head down to the Output To pop-up menu at the bottom of the dialog. Instead of just outputting the results of this dialog to a selection, we can put it on a new layer with a layer mask, so we can always go back and change it if we need to. In fact, we’ll adjust the selection in the next tutorial. For now, though, just choose Layer Mask from the pop-up menu and then click OK.
STEP 15:
Sweet! (FYI: I say “Sweet!” a lot.) You’ve successfully selected a person from a background. Now when you look in your Layers panel, you’ll see the original layer has a layer mask on it. Sometimes your selection will look perfect. If it does, then great, but sometimes it still needs a little more work. If that’s the case, then check out the next tutorial.
I know it seems like it took a lot of steps to do this, if you look back through the tutorial. But, really, it was just because I was explaining things as we went along. Most of the time, after I make a selection with the Quick Selection tool, I generally use the same settings in Refine Edge over and over. Trust me, you’ll develop a knack for it and, after the first few times you do it, you’ll see it only takes a few minutes.
Adjusting the Selection
In the last tutorial, we used the Refine Edge dialog to get Photoshop to do the bulk of the work when selecting someone from their background. Sometimes we get lucky and our selection looks awesome when it’s done. But other times, it needs a little adjusting. Since we created a mask along with our selection, it’s really easy to adjust. That’s the cool thing about layer masks for compositing—they let us go back and adjust the selection as much as we want with the Brush tool, so we can get really detailed if we need to.
STEP ONE:
We finished the last tutorial with our subject selected on his original layer with a layer mask, so all we see is a transparent background. (If you haven’t done the last tutorial yet, feel free to download the file and open it here to start from where I left off.)
STEP TWO:
Before we go any further in adjusting the selection, let’s add a new background