To be honest, pretty much any hard mask created with the built-in Photoshop selection tools is a candidate for enhancement with Refine Edge.
There are typically fine details such as hair/fur, you might have translucent objects that mix with the background, or an edge pixel may be a combination of the subject and background. Even if you have an ideal background (such as a medium gray seamless backdrop) that you can easily select with the magic wand or quick select tool, the edges of the selection shouldn’t be masked perfectly black or white.
Cutting a person/object out to put on a new background.
Without it, you’ll see a small halo at this high contrast edges. Refine Edge offers a very simple and effective way to create a mask that naturally transitions from one to the other. So a mask that is perfectly built on one layer won’t be perfectly aligned with the edge on the other layer. The reason is that some of the highlights spill over by a pixel or two in the brighter exposure. If you compare the highlight pixels on the lighter exposure to the same pixels on the darker exposure, you’ll see that they are often just a little bit different. Not only is this a very hard edged selection (even with a luminosity mask), but the pixels often won’t match up perfectly.
This is common when blending a darker sunset exposure into a lighter building/skyline exposure.
#Photoshop layer edge blending manual#
Manual exposure blending with hard edges.
There are several scenarios where I find I find Refine Edge to be absolutely indispensable: But it can be intimidating and confusing at first, so I created this tutorial to help demystify the magic of Refine Edge. It’s an amazing tool that is actually pretty simple to use once you understand it. Thankfully, Photoshop has a secret weapon called “Refine Edge” (aka “Refine Mask”) to help clean up these nasty edges. Do you ever edge up with hideous edges in your images like this when you blend two layers? These sorts of edge issues are common when placing a person on a new background, replacing a sky, or manually blending exposures to bring back a beautiful sunset.