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Not at all! still struggling with refine.
Carefully selected 'kalonice' with the selection brush tool - small brush.
Made a mask and a white fill layer.
See the result: 1 = no refinement - 2 = once it was refined
What am I doing wrong?
Am I using the wrong selection tool?
Is this because it is a very bad picture, with no contrast between the pumpkin and the background?
Is there a way to enhance the contrast - for example with an adjustment layer - which one?
Can you get rid of the adjustment afterwards?
Can you do other things before proceeding with the selection?
ps: am humbly admitting to be a newbie :) - I have tried several things 
the good thing is that I think to have made progress in selecting :)

I have done several times the https://player.vimeo.com/video/130974710/
am not sure I have the same outcome as the video does ... and the pumpkin is fortunately not hairy :)

kalonice.jpg

1. no refinement.jpg

2. with refinement.jpg

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Hi @venkatesaya,

In this case, you might be better off with a manual selection. The colour near the edge of that pumpkin is really similar to the colour of the pumpkin, and the Refine Selection is struggling with this. It works by colour difference and contrast, which is what's missing from this example. 

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a 'manual' ??? selection 

via google serarch I found (which is somewhere in this forum) this:

If you want truly manual control you can use Quick Mask mode (after closing the Refine Selection dialog). 
Quick Mask mode is entered by pressing the appropriate button in the middle of the toolbar at the top of the main window. 
Then you can use any of the painting tools and filters to edit the selection.

Which painting tools and filters ?

Which tools would you use to repair the dammage?

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54 minutes ago, venkatesaya said:

somewhere in this forum

Here, to be precise:

By the way, it’s unrealistic to expect a reply in less than twelve hours. Forum members are spread around the globe, so there may not be anyone near your time zone who can answer your questions that quickly. In any case, it’s best to leave your original post intact so that future visitors to the thread can see what your question was.

Alfred spacer.png
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for Windows • Windows 10 Home/Pro
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for iPad • iPadOS 17.4.1 (iPad 7th gen)

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You should start using the original full resolution image.

Make a selection with the "Selection Brush Tool" & "Snap to edges" selected in the toolbar.
Then use the "Free hand selection tool (polygonal)" or the "Pen tool" to add or subtract.

Shrink:   "Select > Grow/Shrink" a bit (1 or 2 px)
Smooth: "Select > Smooth" the selection ( a few pixels)
CTRL/CMD  + J to copy the selection on a new layer.
 

kalonice.jpg

Affinity Photo  2.3.1

Laptop MSI Prestige PS42
Windows 11 Home 23H2 (Build 22631.3007) - Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8565U CPU @ 1.80GHz   2.00 GHz - RAM 16,0 GB

 

 
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1 hour ago, GabrielM said:

On a mask, you would paint with white, Black and grey to reveal or hide parts of the image. 

thank you gabriel - sorry for digging further (am in the category of newby ...)

how would you 'reveal' vs 'hide' - do you mean with black and white - or with a modifier on the paintbrush

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Thank you Alfred :27_sunglasses:

By the way, it’s unrealistic to expect a reply in less than twelve hours. Forum members are spread around the globe, so there may not be anyone near your time zone who can answer your questions that quickly. In any case, it’s best to leave your original post intact so that future visitors to the thread can see what your question was.

But I thought in this case it was all these manual adjustments that cause the trouble

 

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26 minutes ago, venkatesaya said:

ilt er een voordeel hierin ipv dat je een masker zou maken?

NIet bepaald. gewoon een kopie op een aparte laag.

Affinity Photo  2.3.1

Laptop MSI Prestige PS42
Windows 11 Home 23H2 (Build 22631.3007) - Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8565U CPU @ 1.80GHz   2.00 GHz - RAM 16,0 GB

 

 
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52 minutes ago, venkatesaya said:

sorry Hubert - ik was net te laat hiermee 

hiermee bedoel je de border-width ? die standaard op 10 % staat

Neen, ik heb Refine niet gebruikt om de selectie te maken. Gewoon in het Menu Select > Grow/Shrink selecteren

Affinity Photo  2.3.1

Laptop MSI Prestige PS42
Windows 11 Home 23H2 (Build 22631.3007) - Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8565U CPU @ 1.80GHz   2.00 GHz - RAM 16,0 GB

 

 
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3 hours ago, venkatesaya said:

thank you gabriel - sorry for digging further (am in the category of newby ...)

how would you 'reveal' vs 'hide' - do you mean with black and white - or with a modifier on the paintbrush

You would create a Mask, then select the mask in the layer studio, and using a black brush you would hide parts of the image, and using a white brush will reveal parts of the image. By default, the mask will be white, so all the parts of the image would be visible. 

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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

Affinity Photo 2.4.0 (MSI) and 1.10.6; Affinity Publisher 2.4.0 (MSI) and 1.10.6. Windows 10 Home x64 version 22H2.
Dell XPS 8940, 16 GB Ram, Intel Core i7-11700K @ 3.60 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060

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  • 10 months later...

@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.,

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