Selection Aliasing

[padillabowen]

I am having serious issues with doing architectural retouching. I am accustomed to making selections with the pen tool for absolute precision.  I copy and paste that area to a new layer, and move it around where I need it.  Distorting, masking, and blending to make it all match up. In Photoshop, that new layer retains only the final dimensions of the manipulated content, and selecting that layer and moving it around moves the entire layer. I can do this forever and every new copy is limited to just the size of the actual content, which is critical when performing warp/distort functions on layer content.

In essence, I discovered through much foul language and time, that AP is treating solid selections as having aliased edges. This means that I am not able to move pixel regions without leaving behind a (literally) invisible ghost. This occurs with both the pen tool and with the marquee tool. With the pen tool I have isolated the cause to the pen stroke, if there is no stroke, there is no ghost. If I Command-Click on the layer, the resulting selection always has a transparent edge that causes a ghost, even when the layer contents are absolutely solid, with clean edges. This is a huge problem when the content needs to be manipulated more than once, or if I want to distort the content then copy/paste/move the new content to another area. Replacing windows is a good example. I would copy one window, resize/warp/adjust it to match a different area, and then make small adjustments to additional copies of that window to finish up the rest of the windows. In this case, every time I move the window, the layer gets bigger and I can no longer distort just the window, AP thinks the whole area in between has some sort of content.

In AP, every time I move those pixels, the persistent edge transparency leaves behind a ghost. That ghost interferes with every other operation I may want to do to that layer. The only way to remove the ghost is to manually select the "empty" area and delete it. It appears to be leaving behind image data every time the selection is moved, and that image data has to be deleted permanently to continue working. This becomes completely unusable when the selection is very complex, such as hair or people. I cannot keep making new selections from scratch just because I moved around some pixels.

 

See this thread for examples...