Refine Edge Feature

If we made a selection, then we can use the “Refine Edge” button which opens a dialog box wherein we can adjust the edge of the selection interactively.
The “Refine Edge” button found right in the Options bar when any selection tool is selected.
We use “Smooth” and “Feather” to soften the edges.
We use “Radius” and “Contrast” to sharpen. (This is new in version CS 3)
And with the slider “Contract / Expand”, we make the selection smaller or larger.
Point your mouse pointer over one of these commands that you see at the bottom of the “Refine Edge” dialog box to see a description and example.

To see the result of our options, we can place different backgrounds in order to get an idea of how our selection will look like and for this we already have the selection.
Check the box “Preview”, otherwise you will make little note of your changes.

In the picture above, the black background is checked as a choice for the preview and it looks good, the blue edges are eliminated.
But when you select the rightmost choice, this is the mask display, you’ll see that we have a hole in our balloon (you will see more on “Masks” (layers) in the next lesson).
In other words, a part of our balloon is not selected.

The white part is what is selected, the black part is what is not selected.

So we must go back to our image and still select this piece.
Click “Cancel” in the “Refine Edge” dialog and add the additional selection to your earlier selection. How to do that, we have seen in a previous lesson.

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