Problem selecting light grey.

[TrevorW]

I have been wrestling with a selection issue.  Funnily it is something I used creatively in PS but in SAPhoto I can't get round it.  I recently took a photo of Lincoln cathedral.  Its pinnacles are covered in light grey lead.  I selected the sky (uniform light grey) and then refine edge to sort out the trees, small pinnacled and balustrades.   The pinnacle tones are similar to sky so I was not surprised to find the programme struggling to select these easily.  I painstakingly painted in the shapes within refine edge.  Marching ants were in the correct place.  However when I used the mask I found that even though I had noticed the red matte of refine edge was somewhat pale and painted in to be deep red, the mask was 50% or so transparent.  The sky replacement obliterated much of the selected pinnacled.  I tried using the pen tool to make selections (my preferred option in PS) and tested - no luck, still partially transparent and indeed when I used refine edge to add to the density of the mask by painting in the selection, it even began to bleed outside the pen selection areas.  

Anyone got a solution, please?

[stokerg]

Hi TrevorW,

 

Can you attach the .afphoto file (or even the just the image before you've done any edits) of your work or upload it here to our Dropbox.  Also are you outputting the selection to a Selection or Mask?  I've just tested this with an image i've got on my iPad, selected the sky and outputted this selection as a Mask, as expected the sky was removed and the rest of the image was left in place.  Will be interesting to try the same with the image you are using.