But there are still some obvious white patches at the ends of the spruce branches. One click and this is where I found myself! If you don’t look to closely, it looks pretty good. If I didn’t have a photo with something nice that would work, I could have used one of the Presets or a solid colour, or nothing at all.

I had this lovely landscape of blue sky with puffy white clouds that will fill the selected area beautifully. But it would be easy enough to go to a different folder and pick something there. It opened up the folder where I got my original image, and lucky for me, there were a few choices of a nicer background in there. Having gone through the whole Edit, this is where I would choose to spend my time Refining in future.Īt this point, I went ahead and chose the photo with the desired background by clicking on the Import a photo bar. The Refine tool is supposed to “snap” to the outline where two colours abut, and perhaps if I changed the tool setting for Snap Strength to 100% it might have worked better for me. I couldn’t zoom in to see what I was doing. I found this part of the process to be a little frustrating. With the mask at 80% Opacity, I can see where the mask obscures areas I want to include, and the white area is where I need to extend the selection. The settings for this are customizable I went with the defaults. When I moved to the Refine selection tool, the selected area turned red.

The trees on the far left are inside the selection already but will need some tweaking too. See the marching ants along the roofline? The spruce in the foreground extends past the roof and needs to be included in the image.

Once I’d brought most of the foreground image into the selection, it was time for fine-tuning. I think the Brush tool might have been a better choice, and I’ll be trying that out in future edits. With a little more patience at this stage, I might have saved some time and effort later but that’s all part of the learning curve. It worked pretty well, for the most part. I tried the Auto selection tool but felt like it lacked control so I backed up and went with the Quick selection tool instead. When you try this, you might want to avoid trees. It’s on my list… Anyway, I thought this would be a fairly simple edit, since the foreground is fairly sharply defined. The sky is pretty blown-out this can be prevented in-camera through the use of neutral density filters, but I haven’t mastered that technique yet. So here’s my base photo, the one I want to improve on. I’ll describe those changes as I go along. Let me say right now that next time I do this, I’ll be making some changes in how I do it. I have SO many photos with blown-out skies that I’d love to replace with something more attractive, so I pulled one out of my Ireland 2018 folder.

Starting with Photoshop Elements 2018, a Guided Edit for replacing an undesirable background was included in the Special Edits menu. And that’s the goal with these tuts, right? I learned a few things while I was doing it and can provide tips for you to make it better for you. Well, this didn’t turn out to be the fantabulous tutorial I had planned… let it be a cautionary tale instead! (I seem to be providing a lot of those lately.) What I was hoping would be simple and fun turned out to be more work than I expected, but it’s all good.

Photoshop 2018 refine edge