Selection Tool(s)

[befehr]

Does anyone else have difficulty with the selection brush tool(s)? The videos show how easy it is yet I cannot get a clean selection unless I use the Freehand Selection tool or spend a crazy amount of time the "Refine" process. 

See the attached image. I have compared it to Pixelmator Pro, which is SO much better, and faster, though of course, it has its many limitations.

[toltec]

Are you trying to separate all this ? 

The image seems to have almost no contrast or hard edges for the Selection Brush tool. So an alternative way ...

 

1 Duplicate the image layer.

2. Adjust the levels for more contrast, merge the Adjustment layer with the Duplicate layer.

3. Select the background (sky) with the flood select (non-contiguous) although you could use the selection brush.

4. Hide or delete the Adjusted and Duplicated layer, and select the original layer so that the pixel selection focus is on the original, layer not the adjusted duplicate.

5. Refine it, mask it, cut it or whatever.

Basically you are making a higher contrast image for selecting only, then moving to the original image for the bit you want. The flood select tool has a tolerance setting, unlike the selection brush, which helps. 

 

P.S. I overdid it slightly on the levels adjustment, so a bit more care and a bit of refining would greatly help.

[R C-R]

What settings are you using with the Section Brush Tool? In particular, is the size of the brush appropriate for what you are trying to select (or avoid selecting)? Larger brush sizes use larger sample sizes to determine how far the selection should expand when selecting similar color value pixels, so too large a brush will usually select more than you want.

I am not sure from your screenshots what you want to select, but judging from how they look, if you want to select just the weathervane, the fastest & easiest way to do that would probably be to use the brush to select the grey areas around it with "Snap to edges" off.& then invert the selection.

[befehr]

Sorry, I guess we need some context here. (It's been a long day).

What you are seeing is the results of the selection placed on a grey background. In this post, I am attaching a new image with a green background for AP and yellow for PP. Please notice the "messiness" of the selection in AP. It can especially be seen in the detail image on the right. 

As far as the tools and process. I used the Selection Brush Tool, then zooming in and out and changing the size of the brush,  I go around the entire area doing the best I can before I go into Refine mode. I start the process over again in the Refine mode. The results are what you see in the attached. 

All of this in and out and refining is all but nonexistant in Pixelmator Pro, and as you can see the results are night and day. If you haven't tried it yet, you should.

[toltec]

Yes. I would agree that the selection brush is not brilliant in Photo. That's why I often try different approaches or quite often use the pen tool. The results are much better when it is practical to use it.

[R C-R]

15 minutes ago, befehr said:

As far as the tools and process. I used the Selection Brush Tool, then zooming in and out and changing the size of the brush,  I go around the entire area doing the best I can before I go into Refine mode.

Without seeing the original background I can't say much about what would work best in Affinity Photo but it looks like you are using too large a brush if you are brushing the weathervane.

Like I said, it often is much quicker & easier to use the brush to select the background (with with "Snap to edges" off) & then invert the selection. Have you tried that?

[befehr]

9 minutes ago, R C-R said:

Without seeing the original background I can't say much about what would work best in Affinity Photo but it looks like you are using too large a brush if you are brushing the weathervane.

Like I said, it often is much quicker & easier to use the brush to select the background (with with "Snap to edges" off) & then invert the selection. Have you tried that?

 

If you want you can try with the original.

As mention, I used small and large brushes and zoomed in over 1200%.

 

[R C-R]

1 hour ago, befehr said:

If you want you can try with the original.

Are you sure the jpeg file you included is the original? Without trying to select anything I zoomed in to about 1000% & what I got was a very blocky low resolution image of the weathervane, with a lot of jpeg compression artifacts:

Hang on. I got the thumbnail, not the original. Working on it now...

OK, the original is much better but still pretty soft & low contrast. Anyway, using the Flood Select Tool & dragging out from the center dark part, at 26% tolerance I got this:

Far from perfect but considering the soft edges not too bad & it only took about a second to make the selection.

[toltec]

1 hour ago, R C-R said:

 

Far from perfect but considering the soft edges not too bad & it only took about a second to make the selection.

That's pretty good using the flood select tool and what I tried but I didn't have the original image. Improving the image with an Adjustment layer first (as I described in my first post) would help. Probably.

I'd like another go but only have access to an 11" screen netbook at the moment. Very hard to see what I'm doing 

[firstdefence]

Flood selection is my fav method, with a bit of tweaking afterwards its a neat tool.

The only issue I have found is, if you apply a filter like levels after selecting and erasing the background; I assume that the selection is for background replacement, you get a halo effect around the edges, I brightened the tower up prior to selection and that effect doesn't occur.

 

[R C-R]

2 hours ago, firstdefence said:

I brightened the tower up prior to selection and that effect doesn't occur.

Even just using the auto contrast prior to making the selection helps quite a bit, but considering how soft the edges are around the center part of the weathervane are in the uploaded jpeg, I am not sure what Pixelmator was doing to get such sharp edges -- judging from the screenshot, it looks like it was doing more than just selecting pixels.

[befehr]

Wow, nice job guys. I guess I will give the Flood tool a try and just keep at it until I get things figured out. Thank you for your help and patience. BTW, this is what I am working on. I chose to remove the wind vane; it didn't fit with the theme.