Refine

[graphos]

Hello.

There is one more extremely unpleasant moment in your magnificent program.

For example.

I need to crop the image through the Refine command. In this case, there are even edges, but there are a lot of images where you want to highlight hair, and then this command is needed. But already with the selection it is clear that the edges of the crop are terribly blurred, and I need smooth edges! And in the end, you see everything yourself ... This is very bad! We have to refine the edges with other tools! It is very uncomfortable!

I already wrote about this to you, but you told me that this is for blurring the edges ... It would be great if you gave us the opportunity to decide for ourselves when we need blurring and when it is inappropriate. This is a huge request!

Sorry and thank you very much!

Oh yes, Lorenzo CHAMPION !!!

 

 

[Ron P.]

Well congratulations to Lorenzo

What technique(s) are you using to cut him out? Using the selection brush, then refine? Have you tried to help Affinity Photo with increasing the contrast between what you're wanting to cut out and the background? Affinity Photo really does a good job with this, but it's not going to be perfect without some prep from you. Corey Barker, was an instructor for Kelby One's Photoshop tutorials. Corey is a master at Photoshop. He had one tutorial where he showed the process to obtain clean cutouts. I don't recall all the steps, but one important one is he used the color channels. He would duplicate his image, then find the channel that provided the most contrast between his subject and background. Using that channel, he'd create a grey layer of his image. He would then max the contrast, which is white and black, using curves and/or levels adjustments. Once satisfied, he would then use that to make his selection. Why? Because that's what selections are primarily based on, the contrasting values. Once he had his selection he could refine it, once refined then he shut off or discarded the grey layer, and viola, he had the selection, a clean precise selection. It takes some work, but it will give you what you're after.

Affinity Photo has this ability, using the Channels. Serif's James Ritson had a tutorial on using channels to make selections. I think it was not redone with the newer tutorials. So I'm not sure if it's still accessible. Here's the current tutorial Channels;Selections

Link to the older tutorial: Channels Creating/Storing Selections

 

[Wosven]

Channels are usefull when you can have good contrats, here, we can see JPEG artifacts, and the image seems to be an already cut out image flattened on a grey background (worst colour for contrast since all channel have the same amount of colour with a neutral grey), and exported as lower resolution.