Refine Selection not working...

[cgorsu]

Let me know if I'm missing something: So I typically make nice crisp selections of hundreds of products or people using paths in Photoshop which I turn into selections, and occasionally they'll need to have textured cloth areas or hair that extends out of this crisp selection. So when I do this in Photoshop I go to refine selection and my sharp selection stays exactly how I made it if everything in Refine is at zero (such as the edge border radius) and then I can just refine the edge only in the area with, say, hair or furriness by painting over the textured area with the refine edge brush. Works perfectly, only changes my selection where I paint.

However when I try the same thing in Affinity Photo, it opens with the edge radius set to 10% which of course ruins the entire crisp selection I'm starting with by attempting to "fix" my perfect edges everywhere... however if I slide this down to 0% so that it has no radius, the radius narrows a little but still keeps a fairly wide radius where it attempts making its own selection, grabbing things I've trimmed out, etc. Now, using the brush to refine the edges where there is hair or texture works great, but it is worthless when 90% of the selection is ruined from the get-go.

Am I missing something? I want to retain my selection, I only want to use refine edge to change a few areas I want to refine. I don't want it to attempt refining my edge on it's own when the edge border (and everything else) is set to zero. !?

Edited July 12, 2021 by cgorsu

[Dan C]

Hi @cgorsu,

Sorry to hear you're having trouble!

Unfortunately there doesn't appear to be any way to have this dialog default to using 0% values, my apologies.

In regards to the selection itself changing slightly, I can confirm this has always (as far as my memory serves) been the case for the Refine Selection option - however I certainly agree that if you have all values set to 0 and have not yet 'painted' on the canvas to change the selection, then pressing Apply should result in exactly the same selection you started with, at least in my opinion.

I'll raise this with our QA/Dev team now, to see if there is more we can do to improve this in a future update. I hope this helps

[cgorsu]

Dang it, that's too bad. Affinity is so promising and the interface is nice and snappy compared to Adobe's apps, but every time I try using it for my real work (in this case for a major shoe company near Portland, wink wink), things just don't work. Yeah, I'd love it if you let the dev team know that when set to zero it doesn't do zero, but if it did do zero (emulating Photoshop doing nothing when set to zero) then it would make that tool way more useful! I'll try Affinity photo again down the road, as I'd love to have an option to Photoshop.

[Xzenor]

Yeah that is how the Refine Selection works. Once you click it it actually already does some refining. In some cases it's enough to just refine selection and immediately press 'apply' without changing anything.I totally understand that it's annoying in this case..

You could make 2 selections perhaps. one with the sharp lines and one with the cloth or hair that you can refine.

If it's incidental then that's a solution I guess but if you have to do this a lot, then it'll probably take up too much of your time.

[cgorsu]

Oh, I don't mind the fact that it opens with a 10% radius, that's easy enough to lower to zero. But I'd consider the tool broken if turning it down to zero is actually turning it down to say 7% or whatever it's actually doing rather than 0%. I'm attempting to refine my selection, not let it auto-select an entirely new fuzzy selection that it doesn't' give me control over. But I'd love it if it actually went down to zero like Photoshop, which would allow a person to refine the selection by just painting in the areas one wants to refine (which Affinity photo does already do perfectly... it's just unfortunately does it automatically everywhere one doesn't want it as well, when having the auto adjustment part set to zero radius should mean no radius adjustment at all).