How to Use selections and masks in Photoshop

5 Paint away

Here’s the Refine Edge tool at work – by dragging our brush around the monkey’s previously roughly cut head, Photoshop has automatically added lots of fur detail. Go around the rest of the outline of your image.

7 Going manual

Here, the Refine Edge brush has failed us, and left a bit of our infant monkey’s head transparent. Fix things like this manually – press B to choose the Selection Brush, then paint the selection back in. Again, a soft brush works best.

9 Smear attack

The top of our monkey’s head has a smear around it, which will look odd when the cutout is used elsewhere. Here, select the Brush tool ( B) and hold å to have brush strokes remove parts of your selection. Paint out all the smears.

6 Corrections

To step back through changes, press å+ç+Z, and make sure each brush stroke is good before moving on. (Redo strokes with ß+ç+Z .) Vary brush size and zoom in (press ç and +) to ensure fine detail is right. Don’t use too hard a brush.

8 Check your work

Press K to see an outline of your selection on a plain black background. You should see lots of fine detail and no hard edges. If you see any of the latter, go back over your work with the Refine Edge brush to correct them.

10 Fine- tune and export

Use progressively smaller brushes to refine your work, then decide how you want to export the cutout under Output Settings. Selection (marching ants) is the most basic, while creating a new layer with a layer mask gives the most flexibility.