@Granddaddy I completely agree, the official affinity video tutorial is little misleading in the sense they show refine edge works perfectly like magic. But it only works where there are color differences and contrast between the subject and background otherwise it better to use other tools like quick mask combined with paintbrush etc.,
The videos about refining selections to extract a subject from a background always seem to use a photo taken with a $3,000 camera with studio lighting on a subject that contrasts sharply with the perfectly uniform and sharply contrasting background.
An amateur like myself is using a $300 camera to photograph 10 family members ranging from a babe in arms to an aged grandfather all standing against a beige wall made available by dragging the couch to the middle of the room with the camera on a tripod using the self-timer so the aged grandfather can trot across the room and get into the picture before the on-camera flash fires thereby casting a shadow on the background wall and with everyone dispersing after two or three shots are taken because the Thanksgiving turkey is waiting on the table. My experience with such photos is that the Refine Selection tool does not do a very good job of selecting blonde hair against the beige wall or brown shoes against the dark brown floor. Nor does it do a great job extracting subjects standing against white vertical blinds where the vertical stripes between the blinds get confused with the black pants of the subjects. So I've not found Refine Selection to be nearly so useful as it appears to be in the videos I've seen.
Under such conditions I have been very successful in making 8x10 prints of what looks to me like studio portraits by doing the following:
1.) Make a pretty good manual selection of the subjects by any means you prefer, whether selection brush, free hand selection, etc.
2.) Refine Selection
3.) Output selection to a mask
4.) Clean up the mask and adjust its edges to conform to the edges wanted for the selection. That requires human judgement to deal with the camera noise along the edges, the halo of shadow cast by the flash, and lack of contrast between items such as brown shoes against a dark brown floor or a beige sweater against a beige wall and further complicated by shadows cast by the on-camera flash so that the subjects and their clothing are not uniformly lit. Painting on the mask with either a white or a black brush eventually allows me to produce a good selection for my modest purposes despite the lack of contrast between the subject and the background I'm trying to extract the subject from.
5.) Create a suitable backdrop layer against which your subject will be displayed. I've constructed such backgrounds using the Perlin Noise filter acting on a pixel layer along with blurs and a live lighting filter. A live Lighting Filter, perhaps with multiple sources, can really enhance that backdrop layer to set off the subjects.
These are all non-destructive procedures, with the exception of the Perlin noise filter used to create the backdrop. Thus you can return again and again to adjust lighting of the background or of the subjects or to adjust the outline of the subjects.
For learning more about using masks, I can especially recommend the twelve video tutorials by Inaffinity at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0YyTWKOid7FRL8tCnGUyUp7DsTNITOzs
I was also helped by the Refining Selections video by Affinicasts at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S61L9InG8tg
Click on View > Studio and check to see if Layers is enabled, if it isn't, click to enable and it will become visible. You can also reset the studio from the same menu, this will reset all panels to default.
Madhu got a reaction from Granddaddy in refine selection affinity photo