Subtitles of the Movie

Whenever you make a selection, by definition there has to be an edge. If the edge is not accurate, you may have traces of the old surrounding pixels and or the area selected may be too abrupt and give the feeling that it was cut and pasted. In versions of Photoshop prior to CS3, we just guessed at how much to feather the edge of the selection and hoped for the best. Refine Edges is a much more controllable tool for determining the transition between the selected and non-selected area. It's available on the Tool Options bar when using most of the selection tools as well as from the Select Menu and it's even available in the Masks Panel but there it's called Mask Edge and if you bring up the dialog, the dialog will be called Refine Mask. But it's essentially the same thing. I'm going to begin by loading a selection of the sky that I made earlier and now I'll come up here to Select, Refine Edge. I just set it to its default values and you can see that down here there are options for different views. My plan is that I'm going to want to do something with the very boring sky in the picture. No matter if I want to just adjust the sky or replace it totally with a new one, I want it to look natural. There's going to have to be an accurate edge that's somewhat gradual. This dialog is going to help me do it. At the bottom are five options for viewing the image. This one just gives marching ants and it's actually very difficult to see where the selection is accurately with marching ants, even if we zoom in. If I use the Quick Mask Mode and the red monolith appears, locking off the selection and in many images that can be very helpful for seeing the edges or I can make my selection look normal and the unselected area be masked off with black or with white or I can just see a black and white view. I think for right now I'm going to work with the Quick Mask option. You can also toggle through these different options by using the F Key and remember that you can zoom in or out of your image by using Control Plus on a PC and Command Plus on a Mac, and of course to zoom out with Control or Command Minus. I'm holding down the Spacebar to move the image around so that I can see the part that I'm particularly interested in or I could click on the Hand Tool and drag the image to see the parts that are of particular concern. Notice that if we wanted to replace the sky, we have a bit of the old sky left here so I know right off the bat that I need to expand my selection. And I can drag that slider as much as I need to until I don't see remnants of the old sky. But I also want to modify these other parameters. Whenever I hover my cursor over one of the sliders, a description appears down here below of exactly what the action will be. So if I use the Radius Slider, it's going to improve the edge in areas with soft transitions or fine details, particularly like trees. Don't hesitate to pull the slider all the way, even though you might not want to leave it there all ultimately because we're going to blur the transition too far here, it will give you an idea of what slider does. And so we're pulling it back just a little bit more; maybe just a little more. I'm getting a pretty nice selection around the edges of the trees. As you'll find when you do it yourself, selecting sky around trees and leaves is one of the trickier things to do but I also may want to address the contrast to help those edges be a little crisper and not quite so blurred. Smooth will refine some jagged edges but you'll lose some detail. So there's a balance between the Smooth Slider and the Radius Slider. Feather is what we used to do and it softens the edge with a uniform blur. But most of the time I think you're going to find that using the Radius Slider will give you more accurate results. When you're done, click OK and your selection will have been modified. Now again, the marching ants that you see back on your image will not be 100 percent accurate. However, if we go ahead and make an adjustment, our transition will now be reasonable. Let me zoom out so we can see the entire image. We can use the selection now as a foundation to replace the sky, which we'll do in another movie or we can invert the selection and work with just the foreground, perhaps to composite it into a different image or anything else that we wanted to do. Whenever you make composites, I think you're going to find that refining the edges is an important step. Since there are so many visual cues within the dialog itself, this is a time when you should take the opportunity to drag the sliders and see what the results do on your particular selection.