Master Selections in Affinity Photo

1. Class Introduction: Welcome to your selections master class. In this course, you'll learn how to make perfect selections and Affinity Photo. No matter the photo you're working on, you'll have everything you need to make a perfect selection of it. That's because we'll learn about all of Affinity selection tools. Each tool works better in certain situations and you'll learn exactly when to use one tool versus another. After that, we'll do a bunch of practice projects so you can put your new skills to the test. We'll start off nice and simple and gradually work our way up to more complex selections. Then once you've mastered the fundamentals of selections, I'll show you some extra tips to make your selections look even better. But to really master selections, we need to learn one of the trickiest things in Affinity, how to select hair. Hair comes in all shapes and sizes, so I'll show you a ton of different techniques for selecting it. I'll even give you some custom hair brushes, which will make selecting hair a lot easier. Even when you're working with a difficult background, you'll have everything you need to make a perfect selection of it. I'm super excited to share these tutorials with you. It's going to be a lot of fun, so let's get started. 2. Download the Class Files: Before you begin this class, I recommend you download the exercise files. These files will be necessary for you to follow along with the tutorials to download the files, come to the project and resources tab. Then click on the Download Link. The files will then be downloaded to your computer and you'll be totally prepared to follow along with the rest of the class. 3. Marquee Selections: To start the course, we're going to learn how to make selections of shapes. You'll learn how to make selections of circles, squares, and more. You'll also learn how to give your selection a hard edge or a soft edge. We'll start off by learning how to use the Marquee selection tools, since they're the easiest way to make selections of shapes. So let's go ahead and start by going over to our Marquee selection tools, which you can find right here. I'll select the Rectangular Marquee tool. And now we can click and drag out a rectangular shape selection. I'll start in this top corner of this square, and I'll click and drag to create a selection box. With our selection loaded. Now all we need to do is come over here and apply a mask to this layer. Now you can see that we've made our first selection of the course by cutting out this square. I'm going to undo these steps a few times with Command or Control Z. That way we can also see what it looks like to make a circular selection. So this time, I'll go back to our Marquee tools, and I'll click on this little gray triangle, and then I'll select the Elliptical Marquee tool. This time, I want to make a circular selection of this circle. So I'll click and drag to create a selection. As you can see, this selection did not appear where I thought it would. I'll deselect with Command or Control D so that we can take a closer look at this. Up in the Context toolbar, you can see that we have this setting checked on from center. That means as we're clicking and dragging, instead of starting at the corner and dragging down to select this circle, I can actually use this by starting in the center of the circle and dragging outward like this. You can see this is a much better selection. Now that I know where to drag this out, I'll deselect again with Command or Control D so that I can show you that if you turn this off and start up here, your selection might still end up a little bit off. So personally, I like to keep from center turned on for the Elliptical Marquee tool. As I click and drag, I really want this to be a perfect circle, not an oval. If you want to make a perfect circle as you click and drag, you can use the shortcut Command or Control. That will lock your circle into a perfect circle. This shortcut is a little bit confusing because if you're used to using Affinity shape tools, then you know that you can hold down Shift to make a perfect circle or square. But when you're using the Marquee selection tools, you need to hold down command or control to make a perfect circle or square. I know that's not the easiest thing to remember, but when in doubt, you can just try both shift and command or control as you click and drag and you'll be able to figure it out really fast. Once you have your selection made, you can actually change how it's positioned by hovering inside of the selection and then clicking and dragging to move it. Now that I have it in place, I can see that this circle is a little bit too small. I've cut off some of the edges. It would be nice if I could adjust this a little bit better. And lucky for us in the next video, I'm going to show you how to adjust your selections even better. 4. Quick Mask Mode: This video, we'll learn how to use Quick Mask mode to improve selections. So let's pick up where we left off in the last video. I have a selection made of this circle, but as you can see, I want to make the selection a little bit larger because these edges have been left out. It's pretty easy to fix this with Quick Mask mode to enter this mode, press Q on your keyboard. Q for Quick. That's a pretty easy shortcut. Now in this mode, you can see a preview of our selection. Everything that's not selected is red. To adjust our selection now, just select the move tool. Now we can zoom in here and pull out the edges of our selection so that we're perfectly selecting this circle and with that, you can see this is a much better selection of our circle. I'll press Q to exit Quick Mask mode. And now that we have our selection made, I can apply a mask to it by clicking on the Mask button, and I'll deselect with Command or Control D. Now we have the perfect cutout of this circle. Now that you know how to use the Marquee tools and Quick Mask mode, I'm going to show you another strategy for selecting shapes in the next video. 5. Shape Tools: This video, we'll learn how to use Affinity shape tools to make selections. To begin, let's select the rectangle tool. And using this rectangle, I'm going to trace this square that we previously selected. To make this a little easier to see, I'm going to change the color to red, and then I'm going to zoom in here so that I can make sure this is lined up with all of the edges of this square. With that all lined up, now we have a perfect shape representing our selection. To turn this into a selection, all you need to do is hold down command or control and then click on the layers icon right here. You can see this has loaded the square shape as a selection. We don't actually need the rectangle anymore, so I'll turn this layer off and then I'll select our photo layer. Now, all we need to do is click on the Mask icon and I'll deselect. So you can see that by using the shape tool, I was able to accurately cut out this square if you ever want to make an accurate selection like this, I think using Quick Mask mode or the shape tool can both work perfectly fine. But there are a few other things that the shape tools can do. So I actually prefer to use the shape tools. I'll just go back with Command or Control Z a few times so that I can show you the advantages to the shape tools. The first thing I love about the shape tools is that we can use them to make selections of any shapes. I'm going to click on the little gray triangle so that you can see how many shapes you can use and turn into selections. For this example, I'm going to use the heart tool and then I'll click and drag a heart shape. I'm going to load this heart as a selection by holding command or control and clicking on the layer icon. We don't need this heart layer anymore, so I'll just turn it off. I'll select the photo layer, and then I'll add a mask. I'll deselect with Command or Control D. The other reason I love using shapes is because you can actually place photos inside of a shape and move it around. So I'm just going to go back a few steps. So this time, instead of turning our heart into a selection, I'm just going to move this photo layer inside of the heart layer like this. This has turned our photo into a child layer to the heart. Now we can use the move tool to adjust the position of this background layer. Now, when you first try to move it, it's not going to work, and that's because photo layers by default will be locked when you open them in Affinity. So just click on this lock icon, and now you should be able to move this around and adjust what you can see inside of this heart. So those are a couple of advantages of using the shape tool instead of the Marquee tools. Now that you know about these two options in the next video, I'm going to show you how to soften the edges of your selections. But 6. Softening Selections: This video, we'll learn how to add a soft edge to selections. Let's go ahead and start by getting out the rectangular Marquee tool. With this tool selected, let's go up to the Context tool bar. The feather setting will adjust how soft our edges become. So in this case, I'm going to raise this up to around 100 pixels. Then I can go ahead and trace out a selection, and then I'll apply a mask to it. I'll deselect with Command or Control D. So now you can see we've made a selection with soft edges. By adjusting the feathering, this is a very easy way to soften the edges, but it's not very flexible. At this point, there's no way to change the softness of these edges. I would need to adjust the feathering and then make a brand new selection. If you want the edge softness to be flexible, instead, we can use the blur filter. So to see how this works, I'll just undo a few times. Now with the rectangular Marquee tool still selected, I'm going to lower the feather back to zero. Then we can go ahead and make our selection and apply a mask. I'll deselect with Command or Control D, and now we can add a blur. I'll go to the filters, and then I'll select the Gaussian blur filter. To blur the edges of our mask, I'm actually going to place this as a child layer to the mask layer. Now as I adjust this gaussian blur, you can see the edges become blurry, and we can adjust how blurry they become one downside to this method is if you really want it to be extra blurry, the edges will come back for your picture. So to fix that, I just want to show you that you can paint on this blur layer with your paint brush. And I'm just going to paint in black paint with 100% hardness and flow. I'll use the bracket keys on my keyboard to make my brush larger. And then we can just paint to remove these soft edges. And at any time, we can always go back to this Gaussian blur layer, click on the layer icon, and adjust the blur. Let's see another method using shapes. I'll undo a few times to go back to the beginning. And this time, I'm going to use the rectangle tool to make our selection I'll place the photo as a child layer to this rectangle. Then we can go ahead and apply a Gaussian blur filter. I'm just going to increase the radius, and you can see that this is actually blurring the photo, not the edges. This isn't what we want. I'll just undo a few times. This time, instead of making our photo a child layer to the rectangle, I'm going to apply our blur to the rectangle. I'll add another Gaussian blur. I'll raise the radius. You can see we have some nice blurred edges now on our rectangle. And now I'm going to right click on this layer, and I'm going to go down to the option that says rasterize. When you rasterize a layer, the layer and its filter will become permanently combined. So after we do this, the blur will not be able to be adjusted. Now that that's combined, I can make this layer a child layer, and you can see that we've created blurred edges. Using this method, we can't adjust the blur anymore, but we can adjust the photo layer. I'll just unlock it, and now we can move this layer around and resize it however we want. Each of these methods has pros and cons, so use whichever one you prefer. In the next video, we're going to finish off this chapter with a little project. 7. Combining Multiple Photos: This video, I'll show you how to combine multiple photos. To get started, let's create a new blank document. I'll go to the top of the screen to file, and then new. I'll choose the size, and then I'll press Create for this project, we're going to combine three photos into this document, and we'll use the shape tools to create frames for each photo. So let's go ahead and start by creating our frames. I'm going to click on the little gray triangle next to our shape tools, and I'll select the Ellipse tool. To make a perfect circle, I'll hold Shift as I click and drag to create our circle so that this is easier to see. I'll just make this a gray color. To duplicate this circle, I'm going to select the move tool. I'll turn on snapping. And then I'll duplicate this by using the shortcut Command or Control J. While holding Shift, I'm going to click and drag to move this. I want this to be 100 pixels away, and you can see these numbers appear as I click and drag. So when I see 100, I'll release my cursor. And now we have two of these circles. I'll create one more by pressing Command or Control J. And you can see that this duplicates 100 pixels away, which is perfect. Now I'm just going to select all of these circles, and I'll make sure that they're centered in our document. Just so it's easier to see what's happening next, I'm going to name each of these circles. So I'll double click on each of the layer names, and I'll just type in a quick name. Okay, with all of that setup, it's time to place our photos. I'll go to the top of the screen to file and then down to place. I'll highlight all three of these photos, and I'll press open. So now I'm just going to click and drag to place these in our document. With all of those roughly placed, I'm going to make them child layers of each of the circles. Now I'll just go into each of these child layers, and I can adjust how each of these are positioned. As you're adjusting these, if the snapping gets annoying, you can go ahead and turn that off so that you can move these photos freely. Okay, these look really nice. To finish, I'm just going to add a little bit more detail. First, I want to give our document a background color. So I'll go to the top of the screen to layer, and then I'll click on New Fill Layer. We can fill this layer with whatever color we want, so I'll just adjust that and then I'll drag this layer to the bottom so that it becomes a background layer. Then as one last detail, I'm going to select our top circle, I'll hold Shift to select the bottom one, and with all of those selected, I'm going to give these circles an outline. I'll go to the FX button down here. Then I'll go to the section called Outline. I'll check that on. And now we can go ahead and adjust the radius and the color of this outline. All right. With that, this project is finished. We've been able to use our new selection skills to place all three of these pictures in this document. Great job. In the next chapter, we're going to move beyond shapes to learn how to make trickier selections. 8. Flood Select: This chapter, we're going to move beyond selecting shapes, and we'll learn how to select any person or object in your photo. We're going to start off with the Flood Select tool, which is used for selecting large areas of the same color. For example, this tool could select a beautiful blue sky or the white background of an image, but it wouldn't be able to select this lion because the area you're selecting needs to be a different color than the colors that surround it. Okay, now that we know what this tool does, let's see how to use it in Affinity. We'll start off by removing the white background of this image. So let's go ahead and get out the Flood Select tool. It's this tool that looks like a magic wand. And now I'm just going to click on the white background. With that selected, we can go ahead and add a mask Whoops. This looks like the opposite of what we want. So to fix this, I'll just press Command or Control D to deselect, and then I'll press Command or Control I to invert the mask. Now you can see the chicken is selected and the white background is removed. Let's go ahead and go to our next image. This time, I want to select the sky. So I'm going to select the Flood Select tool and I'll click in the sky. After clicking on the sky, you can see that it's not all selected, and that's because the sky isn't all the same color. Unlike the pure white background, the sky has different shades of blue in it. Luckily, there's an easy way to fix this. Right now, my tolerance is set to 5%. That's a very low tolerance, which means Affinity will only make a selection of the color I click on and colors that are very, very similar to it. But if I raise the tolerance, Affinity will select the color I click on, as well as colors that are pretty different from it. So I'm just going to raise the tolerance up to 40%. And let's see what happens when I click on the sky now. So now all of the blue sky is selected because my tolerance is higher. But in this case, I do think the tolerance is too high because other colors in the photo are being selected too. So I'll press Command or Control D to deselect. At this point, we know 40% is too high and 5% is too low. So how do we know what tolerance to use? Do we just keep guessing until we get it right? Well, there's actually an easier way. Instead of just clicking on the sky, we can click and drag to gradually select more and more of the sky. And you can see in the context toolbar, the percentage is gradually raising so with a tolerance of 20%, you can now see that all of the sky is selected without selecting the rest of the photo. Well, most of the photo wasn't selected, but you can see if I zoom into the rug, then it actually selected parts of the rug. Apparently, some parts of this rug are similar to the color of the sky. So I'm going to press Command or Control D to deselect so that I can show you another setting. The Flood Select tool has another trick up its sleeve with a contiguous option. Right now, Contiguous is turned off. So when we click in the sky, shades of blue everywhere in the photo will be selected. But if we turn Contiguous on, the only blue areas that will be selected are the blues that are connected to the area we click on. So you can see now all of the blue in the sky is selected, but we have not selected the blue that's in the carpet. That's because the blue parts of the carpet are separated from the blue sky by this orange hill. So depending on your photo, you might want contiguous on or off. And now with the sky selected nicely, we can easily make edits to it like brightening it with a Curves adjustment. I'll deselect with Command or Control D, and now you can see the before and after. Okay, let's come to our third example now. I'm going to select the Flood Select tool, and then once again, I'm going to select the sky. I'll click and drag until all of the sky is selected. For this photo, I needed to use a tolerance of 25% to select the entire sky. But you can see that now some of the snow is being selected, too, even with contiguous turned on. That's because the snow and the sky are connected to each other. They're touching, unlike the rug, which was separated from the sky by that hill. Luckily, I have one last technique to show you. I'll press Command or Control D to deselect. And then I'm going to set my tolerance down low to 5%. Now if I click the sky, only colors that are very, very similar to the color that I clicked on will be selected. At just 5% tolerance, the colors throughout the sky are too different to all be selected, but we can work around this by making multiple selections and combining them together. But how can I do that? Every time I click in the sky, a new area is selected. Well, that's because we're currently set to New Mode in the Context Tool bar. In New Mode, you'll make a new selection every time you click somewhere in the Photo. But if you want to combine selections, then you can use add Mode. So you can use Add Mode to add multiple selections together or if you'd prefer, and this is how I like to do it, you can stay in new mode and then just hold down Shift as a keyboard shortcut to add more to your selection. So while holding down Shift, I can click anywhere in the sky to add to my existing selection. And now you can see we've made this great selection of the sky without selecting the snow. Now we can edit the sky however we want. For example, we could add an HSL adjustment to give it a little bit more color. I'll deselect and show you the before and after. All right. Nice job. I know that was a lot to learn, but now you're a Flood Select master. In the next video, we'll learn about another powerful selection tool, the selection Brush. 9. Selection Brush: Let's learn about the selection brush. With the selection brush, you can paint a selection across anything in your photo, and Affinity will do its best to select it. So let's go ahead and start by selecting our selection brush right here. And then all we need to do is click and drag to paint a selection across this woman. After painting, it's a good idea to zoom in and make sure everything is selected properly. This all looks pretty good, but there are a couple of areas that we need to remove from the selection. By default, the selection brush is in add mode, but we can use subtract mode to remove these areas. Or if you want to use keyboard shortcuts like me, you can hold down Alt or option to paint away these areas. I'm just going to use the bracket keys on my keyboard to make my brush a bit smaller. Then I'll hold down Alt or option as I paint this to remove it. I can always add to my selection again by painting normally. Then I'll hold Alt or option to continue to remove. With our selection made, now we can add an adjustment layer to alter this photo. For example, we can adjust the lighting by adding a Curves adjustment. For this photo, I think it looks nice to bring the white point over to make the white areas even brighter in this photo. I'll close out of this. I'll deselect with Command or Control D. And now you can see the before and after. We were able to brighten the person without brightening the white background before and after. So those are the main things that you need to know about the selection brush. But here are a few last tips. I recommend that you keep soft edges checked on. This will soften the edges of your selections so that they don't have harsh distinct edges. I also like to keep snap to edges turned on. But to see how this works, I'm going to turn it off. Then I'm just going to make my brush larger with the bracket keys. And then I'll try to make a selection of the woman. With snap to edges turned off, you can see that the selection brush will make a selection of whatever I paint over, but not much else. It's not snapping to the edges of the person. I'll deselect. And then I'll turn snap to edges back on. Now as I start painting, you can see Affinity will do its best to snap to those edges. Because this option makes things faster and easier to make selections, I like to keep it turned on. Finally, the last option that you should know about is the all layers option right up here. To see how this option works, I'll turn it off. Then I'll just make a new selection. Once again, you can see this isn't working. It's really struggling to make a selection of the woman. Why is that? Well, it's because of the layer that I have selected. In the Layers panel, you can see that the Curves adjustment layer is selected, not the woman with all layers turned off. Affinity can only use the layer that you have selected to figure out what to select. So if I wanted to select the woman, I would need to make sure her layer is selected, I'll deselect, and now I'll try to make a selection, and you can see it's snapping properly. In general, I like to keep all layers checked on. That way, I don't need to worry if I have the right layer selected over here. But if you ever want to select one layer in particular, then you can just turn this option off and then make sure you have the right layer selected. And with that, you're now a selection brush master. This really is a great tool for making selections. But in the next video, I'm going to show you another great tool for making selections, the Object Selection tool. 10. Object Selection Tool: Let's learn about the Object Selection tool. This tool uses AI to make selections. Now, I know at the mention of AI, half of you are jumping for joy while the other half are rolling your eyes at another company jumping on the AI bandwagon. So let me explain what we're talking about. There are different types of AI, and the type of AI that Affinity uses is called machine learning. In machine learning, you can give a computer a large set of data, and the computer will look for patterns in the data. So in the case of Affinity, the developers gathered a large set of photos and then organized those photos into different categories. Then they gave these photos to a computer so that it could look for patterns. Eventually, the computer saw that there were patterns to what a person usually looks like, what a cat usually looks like, and so on. Based on these patterns, the computer could develop an algorithm that determines the different parts of a photo. This sort of algorithm is called a machine learning model. After that, the Affinity developers could use the machine learning model to make a new selection tool. Since the algorithm can identify different parts of a photo, it can also be used to select things. And here's the really great news. Since the machine learning model has already been developed, none of your photos will be used to train it. In fact, the Affinity developers won't even see your photos because the Object Selection tool runs the machine learning model right on your computer. That means that your photos are totally safe. They will never be uploaded to a cloud server. So I'm a really big fan of how AI has been implemented in Affinity. I think this is a great example of AI done the right way. So with that being said, let's jump in to Affinity Photo and learn how to use the Object Selection tool. The Object Selection tool can be found right over here. When you first try to use it, this pop up will appear. This will prompt you to download the machine learning models. So just click on settings, and from here, you can press Install on both of these options. Now that we have those installed, we're ready to use the Object Selection tool. So go ahead and select the tool again, and then all we need to do is wait a few seconds for AI to analyze your photo, and then you can hover over different objects in your photo. This will show you a preview of the selection. So in this example, if I click now, I would select the background, or if I hover over the man, I can select the man. So I'll just click on the man to select him. And then we can go ahead and make an adjustment. I'll select the Curves adjustment, and I'll just brighten this up. I'll deselect with Command or Control D. And now you can see the before and after. Wasn't that so easy? What an easy way to make a selection. Okay, so that's the very basics. Let's learn a little bit more about the object selection tool. First, I'll select the photos layer so that the AI can analyze that layer as it figures out what to select. Now I want to show you how to select part of an object. To do this, you can hold down Alt on a PC or option on a Mac. Then you can move your cursor over the photo, and Affinity will select individual parts of the man like his skin, his sweatshirt, or his sweatpants. Just be careful where you place your cursor, because the Object Selection tool can actually make different selections depending on exactly where you hover your cursor. You can see I'm still hovering over his pants, but now it's selecting his hands and part of his sweatshirt. So just pay attention to where you place it so that you're selecting the right area. For this example, I'm going to click to select his sweatshirt. Then I'm going to add an adjustment to it. This time, let's do the recolor adjustment, and now we can choose whatever color we want. I'll deselect with Command or Control D. And now you can see, just like that, we've recolored the sweater. So those are the main things you need to know about the object selection tool. But before we finish the video, I just want to mention a few last things. Just like with the selection brush, I recommend you keep soft edges checked on just to soften the edges of your selection so they don't have a harsh distinct edge. I also want to mention that the Object Selection tool uses Ad Mode by default. So you can click on multiple things in your photo, and the selections will be combined. So with the Photo layer selected again, I'll hover over the sweatshirt while holding Alt or option, and I'll click, and then I'll hover over his sweatpants while holding Alt or option, and I'll click. And now both of those areas are selected. I'll deselect to show you one last setting. So the last setting up here is multipart objects. To see how this works, let's try to select one of his hands. If I hold Alt or option, you can see that it's selecting both of his hands. That's because AI thinks of his hands as one object. With multipart objects turned on, Affinity will try to select all parts of an object, even if they aren't touching each other. But if we turn this option off, then we can select an individual object like one hand. I'm holding Alt or option, and I'm hovering over his hand so that we can only select one of them if we want. Normally, you'll want to select all parts of an object. I usually keep multip objects turned on. By just holding Alt or option, that's usually enough to select the area you're aiming for. Okay, now to finish the video, I do want to mention a bit of bad news. Unfortunately, for people using Max, the Object Selection tool only works on Max with Apple Silicon, as opposed to older Mac that have Intel chips. I know that's pretty disappointing, but luckily for Windows users, you'll be able to use this tool regardless of what hardware you have. And with that, you are now an Object Selection tool master. Great job. Now in the next video, we're going to learn how to combine selection tools to make a better selection than any one tool could do on its own. 11. Combining Selection Tools: This video, we'll learn how to use multiple selection tools to make a selection. To begin, we'll use the Object Selection tool to make a selection of the woman. I'll click to Make My selection. And now you can see we have a pretty good selection of this woman. But there's one major issue. There's an area of the background that's been left behind. This is a common problem with the object selection tool. The AI can get confused and include pieces of the background, especially if there's gaps in an area that you're trying to select, like the gap in between these arms. But luckily, there's an easy fix. We can use the selection brush to quickly remove this area from our selection. Remember that the selection brush is in add mode by default. So you can just change it to subtract mode, or you can hold Alt or option and then click right here to remove this area from the selection. And just like that, we have a very nice selection of this woman. So now we can edit it however we want. For example, I'm just going to go to our adjustments and I'll apply a Curves adjustment. Then I'll brighten it up. And I'll deselect. Now you can see the before and after. I think this looks so much better. She really looks like the focus of this photo. So the main thing that I want you to take away from this is that you can use multiple selection tools to make a selection. You can combine any tools that you want. But typically, you should start your selection with the Object Selection tool and then use the selection brush for cleanup. Or for photos with large areas of the same color, you can start with the Flood Select tool and then use the selection brush for cleanup. But the selection brush isn't the only way to clean up a selection. In fact, Affinity has an entire tool for refining selections, which we'll learn about in the next video. 12. Refining Selections: Let's learn how to refine selections. To do this, we'll use the refined selection dialog box. This gives us quite a few options for improving a selection. But out of all of the options, the most common one is to improve selections of hair. As an example, let's say that you want to put this woman onto a color background. Well, if you only used the Object Selection tool, then it would look something like this. Right away, you can see we're missing all of the fine details on the edges of her hair. But if we used the Object Selection tool and refined the selection, then the hair would look so much better. Later in the video, we'll learn about other ways that you can refine a selection. But for now, let's jump into Affinity and see how to refine hair. For this example, we'll use the same photo that we used in the Object Selection tool lesson, and just as before, I'm going to select the man with the Object Selection tool. So I'll just hover over him and I'll click. With that selection made, I'm going to go over to our adjustments and I'll apply a Curves adjustment. Just so that we can see what's going on here, I'm going to brighten this quite a bit. I'll close out of this and I'll deselect with Command or Control D. So you can see overall, this looks like we have a pretty good selection here. We were able to brighten the man pretty well. But if you zoom into his hair, you can start to see the problem. We're getting this strange effect where parts of the background are being brightened. It's not a very clean selection up here. That's because the object selection tool can't select hair very well, but luckily, we can fix this by refining the selection. So I'll just undo a few times by pressing Command or Control Z. And now this time, I'll go up to the Context tool bar and click on this refine option. This option will appear if you have any of Affinity's selection tools selected. So I'll press refine. And now all we need to do is paint around the edges of his hair. By painting around the edges, it's pretty much telling Affinity, Hey, take a second look at these areas and try to make a better selection. As you're painting, you might run into a little problem. If you try to move this dialogue box out of the way, you can see your paint brush will disappear. If this happens, just click anywhere in the photo, and then you can continue painting. All right. With that painting done, I'm going to press Apply in the dialogue box. And now you can see we still have our selection made, but it looks a bit better. To really see this, I'm going to add a Curves adjustment. And once again, I'm going to brighten this quite a bit. I'll deselect by pressing Command or Control D, and now you can see the before and after we no longer have that strange effect where parts of the background are being brightened. So you can see that by refining the selection, we're able to brighten the man without brightening the background. This technique also works with things that look similar to hair, like the fur of an animal or any clothing that has soft edges. Just paint over the edges, and Affinity will improve your selection. That's the main reason that you'll use refined selection. But let's look at its other options, which can be useful in certain situations. First, let's look at the smooth slider, which is the second most common way to refine a selection. As you might be able to guess, this slider will make the edges of your selection smoother. As an example, let's take this photo of a cookie and put it on a black background. If we zoom in, you can see that the edges of the cookie are bumpy. Maybe this is how you want it to look, but if you want a smoother edge, it would look more like this if you increased the smoothness of your selection, just be careful not to bring the slider up too far, or you'll smooth out dips and bumps that are supposed to be there. Okay, let's set the smoothness back to zero so that we can take a look at feathering. This slider will soften the edge of your selection by blurin it. In our cookie example, here's what feathering looks like. A soft edge like this can sometimes look nice, but I actually don't like to use the feather slider. That's because the Gaussian blur filter can do the exact same thing, and it can also be adjusted at any time in case you want a different amount of blur later on. We briefly used this filter earlier in the course, but we'll take a closer look at it in the Pen tool chapter. So for now, let's set the feathering back down to zero so that we can learn about matt edges this option is similar to feathering because it will soften the edge of your selection. But Matt Edges is actually smarter because it will preserve small details on the edge of your selection. As an example, let's say that you were working on this photo and to better see what's going on, let's zoom in to the edge of her sweater. Now, let's say we want to put her on a black background. With matte edges turned off, this is how it would look not very good. To fix this, you could add some feathering, but now it just looks blurry. So instead, let's use Matt Edges. Now the edge isn't jagged, and we get to keep the small details on the edge of her sweater. That's why I really like to use matt edges. And luckily for us, it's turned on by default, so you don't even need to remember to do anything. Okay, now let's take a look at AMP, which controls the amount of detail that matt edges will keep. If you increase the ramp, you'll keep more detail on the edge of your selection. And if you bring ramp down, you'll keep less detail on the edge of your selection. But honestly, I pretty much never use ramp, so I don't think you need to worry about it too much. Instead, let's look at the last slider border width. This slider works hand in hand with matt edges. But to see how this works, let's reset the photo back to how it was originally. This time, let's see how this would look on a color background. If you only used the Object Selection tool, as we saw earlier in the video, this doesn't do a very good job at selecting her hair, but hold on. Isn't matte edges supposed to soften the edge of our selection while also keeping small detail selected? How come it doesn't do that for her hair? Well, actually, it does. But by default, the border width is set to a very small amount, and border width is the area that matt edges will look at. Since it's set to such a low amount, MT edges will only look for details that are right on the edge of your selection. But if you increase the border width, then the mat edges will search for a larger area, which means it will find all of the small details on the edge of her hair. But there's a small problem. If you look at the front of her sweater, you can see it looks terrible. Because of the larger border width, Matt Edges searched a wider area for small details to keep. That worked well for her hair, but Matt Edges got confused when it searched a wider area of her sweater. So because of this, I usually leave the border width at its default value. Making it bigger can just cause too many problems. If only there was a way to apply matt Edges to just her hair without increasing it on the rest of the selection, Oh, wait, there is. In fact, you've already seen it. Remember earlier in the video when we painted on the man's hair, well, you might not have known it at the time, but you were actually using matte edges, and you did it by using the mate brush. This brush will apply matte edges to anywhere you paint without you needing to increase the entire border width. The mate brush is really useful for selecting hair or fur, and it's the most common thing you'll do when refining a selection. But there's actually a few other brushes as well. The next brushes are foreground and background, which allow you to add or remove from your selection. The foreground area is the area that you're trying to select. So if you use this brush, you can paint on anything that you want added to your selection. And the background brush is just the opposite. Anywhere you paint will be removed from your selection. But the special thing about these brushes is that they're smart. So even if you don't do a perfect job at painting, Affinity will do its best to figure out what you are trying to select. Let's see a quick example of this by selecting the woman from the selection brush lesson, this time, let's just select her using the Object Selection tool. With our selection made, we can go up to the Context toolbar and press Refine. It looks like Affinity missed some areas. So I'm going to use the foreground brush to paint over the edges of her coat right here. You can see that by using the foreground brush, we've added that area back in, and I can do this on the other side as well. Affinity also selected too much of the background in a couple of areas. So I'm going to switch to the background brush, and then I'll click to roughly paint these areas. You can see that I'm not painting super carefully, and Affinity is able to guess what I want painted, which is pretty cool. Okay, now let's learn about the final brush that you can use when refining a selection, the feather brush. Just like the feather slider, this brush can make the edge of your selection softer. But by using the feather brush, you can paint over specific areas rather than softening all of your selection. Now, as I mentioned earlier, I prefer to use the Gaussian blur filter, which we'll practice in the Pen tool chapter of the course. Okay, we're almost there. The only things left are the preview options and the output methods. Let's do the preview options first, since they're really easy to understand. When you click on this box, you'll get different options for previewing your selection. These options don't actually change your selection in any way. They're just a different way to check how your selection is looking Overlay is the default option, which makes everything outside of your selection red. But you can also preview your selection with a black background, a white background, a transparent background. Or as a black and white preview, where the background is black and the area you have selected is white. And finally, let's jump back into Affinity to see how the output methods work. If I open up this dropdown box, we're given different options for what will happen when we finish refining our selection. First, let's use the default output method, which is selection. Then I'll press Apply this option is pretty straightforward. After refining your selection, it just keeps your selection as a selection. That's simple enough. So let's take a look at the next option. This time, we can change the output method to mask. Then I'll press Apply. This option is pretty straightforward. It just turns your selection into a mask, which you can see over here in the Layers panel. Let me undo that with Command or Control Z so that we can see the next option. This time, I'll use the next option, which is new layer. Then I'll press Apply. This option is a little bit fancier. It duplicates your selected area onto its own layer, and it turns off your original layer. I'll undo that so that we can see the last option. This time we'll use new layer with mask. Then I'll press Apply. So this is the fanciest option. It duplicates your entire photo and applies a mask to it, and it also turns off your original layer. I'm going to undo this one last time so that I can show you the output method that I actually like to use. So out of all of these options, the output method that I actually use is just the default option selection. I like to just stick to the default because once you have a selection, you can easily do the same thing as any of the other output methods. For example, I could apply a mask just by clicking the mask button down here, or I could duplicate my selected area by just pressing Command or Control J. Then I could just deselect with Command or Control D, and I could turn off the extra layer. So as you can see, once you have a selection, you can easily do whatever you want with it. That's just my personal preference. So feel free to use the output methods if those work better for you. But no matter how you decide to work, you've now completely mastered the refined selection tool. Great job. This tool is a powerful way to improve selections, but as great as it is, it doesn't work perfectly in every situation. So, in the next video, I'm going to show you how to make a perfect selection, no matter what type of photo you're working with. 13. Painting Selections: This video, we'll learn how to make perfect selections by using the paint brush. Using the paintbrush is a little bit slower than using selection tools, but it's the best way to make precise selections of difficult areas. For this example, we'll use an HSL adjustment to change the color of her dress. But first, we'll need to make a selection of it. To speed up the process of painting the selection, I'm going to use the Object Selection tool to get us started. I'll hold Alt or Option to select just her dress. With our selection made, I'm just going to apply the HSL adjustment. And then we can go ahead and choose whatever color we want. I'll deselect with Command or Control D. And now we can zoom in to see that Affinity did a pretty good job with this selection. There are a few problem areas, though. If we zoom in to the edges, you can see some of the red from her dress is still left behind. Another major problem area is her belt down here. You can see a lot of the belt turned blue, and if we turn this adjustment off, you can see that it originally is this brown color. So now to clean up that selection, we're just going to paint on this mask to add and remove these different areas. So to start, I'm going to select the paintbrush tool. Our colors are set to black and white, which is perfect. We'll use black to remove from our selection and white to add to our selection. We can press X on the keyboard to quickly switch between these two colors. I also like to have 0% hardness and full flow for this just so we can keep a nice soft edge as we're painting. So I'll just adjust the size of my brush as I go. And then I'll paint along here to clean up this belt. Sometimes it's nice just to paint a little bit too much and then go back and fix it up later. So I'm just painting a little bit extra. Then I'll press X on my keyboard. And I'll just clean up those areas. That belt looks so much better. Let's go up to the edges of the dress and continue this painting in white paint to add to our selection and black paint to remove if we ever paint too much. As you paint this selection, you might be thinking, Wow, this is pretty tedious. But if you get good at painting selections, you really can select anything. It's a really nice skill to have As I'm painting away these edges, I just thought that I'd mention that the color that's left behind on the edges is very common. This is called fringing. So by painting this away, we are defringing the edges. Okay, with that selection painted on, now you can see the before and after. Okay, I have one more example for you. We just saw how the paintbrush is great for cleaning up selections when selection tools don't do a perfect job. But the paintbrush is also great for painting less specific areas. For example, in this photo, I want to brighten quite a few different areas, and it doesn't need to be so specific painted perfectly along the edges. So in this case, using the selection tools wouldn't make a lot of sense. Instead, we can use the paintbrush to quickly paint over all of the areas that we want brighter. So I'm going to add a Curves adjustment and then I'll brighten this up. You can see this is way too bright in some areas. I'm going to invert this layer with Command or Control I. So now you can see we have a black mask. I'm going to grab the paintbrush tool and I'm going to press X on my keyboard to paint in white paint to reveal this brightness. Now, before I begin painting, I'm going to lower the flow of my paint brush quite a bit. That way, I can gradually paint this brightness just over the areas I want it. I'll also use a larger paint brush. So I definitely want to emphasize this dog. The dog already has some bright areas, so I'm just going to go in here and brighten a little bit more. I'll brighten the bed that the dog is laying on. We can also add a little bit more brightness to the windows, and maybe just a little bit more around these bright spots on the floor. All right. Now you can see the before and after adding just a little bit more brightness to this picture. I think I might have painted a little bit too much, so I'm going to lower the opacity of the layer to soften this before and after. Very nice. So now you know how to paint selections onto a photo. With that, we finished the chapter. Great job. In the next one, we're going to do a project to practice everything that we've learned so far. 14. Is Precision Needed?: In this chapter, we're going to do a practice project where we cut a man out of his background. This is going to be a fun way to review what we've learned so far and we'll pick up a few more skills along the way. Even though this is a fairly simple photo, it's still going to take some work to do a good job removing the background. Now, before we do that, I want to point out that you don't always need super precise selections. As an example, let's say that you just want to brighten this man. In that case, you could get out the Object Selection tool and then make a quick selection of him then we could add a Curves adjustment and brighten him up. I'll deselect. And now we can take a look. Here is the before and after. I think this looks pretty good. So if that's all you wanted to do, that was actually a very easy selection to make. But instead of brightening him, what if we wanted to remove the background? I'm just going to undo a few times. And this time, instead of applying the Curves adjustment, I'm going to add a mask. I'll deselect, and we can go ahead and zoom in. I think this looks pretty good, but let's double check. I'm going to go to the top of the screen to layer, and then I'll go down to New Fill Layer. I'll drag this underneath our subject, and I'll make it black. Now you can see, maybe this wasn't a perfect selection. You can see the hair has some white areas left behind from the background. You can also see some fuzzy areas on the edges that should be more solid. The detail isn't quite perfect. Even for a pretty simple photo like this, Affinity didn't do a perfect job with the selection. It did good enough to brighten him, since that didn't need to be super precise, but we'll need to do some more work if we want to perfectly remove the background. So over the next few videos, we'll put our selection skills to the test and do exactly that. 15. Refining the Selection: Let's begin this project by refining the selection. So we're going to start all the way back at the beginning. Let's grab the Object Selection tool and hover over the man so that we can select him. With the selection made, I'll click Refine in the Context toolbar. And now we can do some refining to the edges of our selection. First, I'm going to paint over the edges of his hair to make sure all of this little detail around the edges looks really good. Next, I want to take a look at the edges of his sweater. If we change the preview mode to white mat, you can see this looks pretty good. But if we change the preview to black mat, you can see we have a little bit of a problem all along the edges of his sweater. We have these little white fuzzies. I don't think this looks very good. But lucky for us, we can smooth out these problem areas with the smooth slider. I'll bring this up so that we can see what this looks like. And, wow, that really took care of that problem. I'm just going to lower the slider to see if we can get away with a lower number. Alright. I think that looks pretty good. Around 20. The fuzzies are gone. It did add a little bit of a curve to this corner, but we can take care of that in the next video. For now, I think his sweater looks really good. But let's see how this smooth slider affected his hair. It's a little hard to see with the black mat preview, so I'll change this to white mat. And now you can see that the smooth slider really destroyed the detail of his hair. So I think we'll need to smooth out his sweater and his hair separately. I'll lower the smooth slider back to zero so that his hair looks good, and then I'll press Apply. I'll add a mask and I'll deselect with Command or Control D. Now so that we can make these two separate selections, I'm going to duplicate this layer with Command or Control J so that we can do another version with his sweater nicely selected. I'll rename this top layer, refined hair, just so we can keep things straight and then I'll turn off this layer. Now let's work on our bottom layer. I'll open up the group and delete this mask so that we can make a brand new smooth version. I'll hover over the man to make our selection. Then I'll click Refine, and I'll bring the smooth slider back up to 20. I'll press Apply, and I'll add a mask to this selection. Then I'll deselect with Command or Control D. Okay, so now we have two layers, one with well selected hair, and one with well selected sweater edges. You can see this version has the really bad hair selection, and I just want to get rid of that. So I'll grab the paint brush. I'll increase the flow and hardness all the way back up to 100%. Then I'll paint in black paint on this mask to remove the top section of the hair. Okay, to add this hair back in, we're going to get a little bit tricky. Let's turn on this layer. And then let's hold command or control and click on the layer icon. This has loaded this version of our mask as a selection. So you can see all the little bumps and ridges to the hair have been added back into this selection. I'll turn off this layer, and with the selection still loaded, I'll switch my paint color to white, and I'll paint his hair back in. Then I'll deselect with Command or Control D. You can see that we were able to use this refined hair selection and add it to this mask. So now we have a great selection of the hair, and we have smooth edges to our sweater. This looks really nice. I'll delete this refined hair layer since we don't need it anymore. And now that we have this great selection started in the next video, we'll continue this project by cleaning up any other problem areas in our mask. 16. Mask Clean Up: This video, we'll clean up our mask. To see things better as we work, I'm going to go to the top of the screen to layer, and then I'll go down to New Fill Layer. I think we were able to see the edges pretty well with that black mat preview. So I'll make this black and I'll drag it beneath our layer. Now we can zoom in and take a closer look here. So even though we smooth things out and we made a really good selection of the hair, I can still see some problem areas. So to begin, I'm just going to select the mask layer. Then with the paint brush selected, I'll lower the hardness back down to zero with 100% flow. I think that'll work pretty well. I'm going to change our default colors back to default by pressing D on my keyboard. And now I'm just going to begin painting. To fix these sharp corners, I like to paint away everything and then switch my paint color back to white so that I can add things back in. To me, this just makes it easier to keep the corner nice and sharp. In between his legs, I can see this little bit of extra fabric. Now, that really was in the original photo, but I think it would look a little bit cleaner if that were removed. So I'm going to remove that trying to paint in a nice straight line. Again, I'll paint a little bit too much. I'll switch my paint color back to white so that I can make that a nice sharp edge. Doesn't that look nicer? I think it's a good idea to use your artistic eye and make subtle changes like this whenever you want. We are the artists. I'm just going to continue to check all of the edges to make sure they all look good. Okay, so I just went around all of the edges other than his hair. And the reason I stopped at the hair is because I wanted to show you this white glow that we have going around his hair. This white glow is fringing from our original background. Even though our mask looks really good, why does this look so bad? Well, the problem is that the color of the background, this whitish gray color is reflecting onto his hair. It's bleeding into it. I don't think this looks very good, but luckily, this is pretty easy to fix. I'll show you how to do that in the next video. 17. Defringing: Let's learn about defringing. Okay, we're going to work on defringing the edges of his hair in this video. But first, I just want to show you a simple version of the technique that I'm about to show you. First, I'm going to add a new pixel layer. Then I'm going to change my paint color to a nice bright color, and I'll just paint over our subject. You can see I painted outside of the lines a little bit, but that's actually okay because we can always make this pixel layer, a child layer to our background layer. So now you can see it's locked into this selection. I can paint right up against the edges, and you can see it keeps all of that nice detail on the edges. So all we need to do to fix this white haloing is paint a better color, his hair color instead of this red color. I'll delete this pixel layer, and we can start fresh with a new one. I'll make it a child layer once again. And now we can go ahead and paint that better color. To get his exact hair color, I like to use the clone brush. Make sure your clone brush is set to current layer and below. Then we can get started. To use the clone brush, just hold Alt or option and click to create a sample point. Then I'm going to make my brush a little larger. There we go. I'm just going to paint over the edges. It looks like I have a very hard edge right now, so I'll undo with Command or Control Z, and instead, I'm just going to lower this down for this technique to keep the edges nice and soft. You can see my sample point is following me as I do this, which is great. Unless I start to cross over into his skin, then you can see we're sampling the wrong color. I'll undo that with Command or Control Z to show you that you can sample as you go, hold Alt or option and click, and then paint. You might need to do this a few times in this narrow area. Maybe you could even sample a color up here. So I'm just sampling and painting all the way down the edges of his hair. So now you can see that white fringe is gone, but it's a little hard to see what's going on. So I'm going to change the fill color layer to a different color. It seems like it's not working to change this color. That's because of the tool I have selected. The fill layer really likes the gradient tool, so I'll select that. And now it will let me change the color. I think this orange color looks pretty good for seeing the detail of the hair. I'll select the pixel layer and the clone brush again and we can continue. But you can see already this looks so much better. So I'll just continue holding Alt or Option to sample, and then I'll paint right along the edges. Okay. I think this looks so good. But before we finish, I just want to show you that I did notice a little bit of a problem area at the top of his head. I'll select the fill layer. I'll change it back to the gradient tool, and I'll change the color back to black so that we can take a look here. It's very subtle, but there's some little lines going on up here. To fix those lines, I'll select the mask layer and the paint brush. I'll press D for default colors. Then I'll press X to switch to black paint so that I can remove those little areas. It's a little hard to see on mine, but you might have it a little more intensely right there. It was like that because in our background, we had some little lines on the wall, and Affinity got a little confused and thought that was part of his hair. Alright. Great job. I think this looks so good. This really helped fix that lighter area. I know that took a lot of work, but now we have a perfectly removed background. As we saw in this video, defringing is a really important step to making selections look good. So in the next chapter, I'm going to show you even more techniques for defringing so that you'll be totally prepared to make all of your selections look perfect. 18. Color Blend Mode: This chapter, we're going to learn so many great techniques that you can use to defringe your selections. We'll start off in this video by learning a technique that uses the color blend mode. To get started, let's make a selection of this woman using the Object Selection tool. I'll click and then I'll refine this selection. And we can go ahead and paint around the edges of her hair. I'll press Apply, I'll add a mask, and I'll deselect with Command or Control D. To see the selection a little bit better, I'm going to add a fill layer, so I'll go to the top of the screen to layer, and then down to new fill layer. I think white will work for this one. I'll just drag this underneath our subject. And now we can go ahead and zoom in to see that her hair has some pink fringing left behind from the original background. Now, before I teach you this new technique, I want to review how you could use the clone brush to remove this fringing. So remember, for this technique, let's just add a new pixel layer and then make it a child layer to our image. Now with that pixel layer, we can grab the clone brush, make sure this is set to a current layer below. And then we can just zoom in here, hold Alt or Option to sample, and then we could paint over the hair. While cloning can look pretty good for removing the fringing, I do want to point out how careful you need to be. Up here, you can see the hair is going in kind of a weird direction. If you sample hair, that's not going in the right direction. This can look really strange for areas like that. So make sure you're sampling hair that's going in the right direction. And you can take care of the fringing pretty well that way. If I wanted to redo this area, I would just make sure I'm choosing hair that's going in this direction. So I'll sample down here and then paint over the area. So cloning works pretty well. I will say that I think it works a little bit well with more random hair like the man's hair in the last video. So let's go ahead and learn about a new technique using the color blend mode. I'll just delete this pixel layer, and we can make a new one and set it as a child layer to our background layer. Then I'm just going to go over here. I'll grab the paintbrush tool. Then I'm going to sample the hair color. So I'll hold Alt or option, and I'll click on the hair. So you can see we have a nice brown color loaded here. And then I'm just going to paint this over the hair. This has added a flat color across that hair, but we can make it look more natural by changing the blend mode. So over here, I'm going to click on the word normal, and then I'm going to go down to where it says color. The color blend mode allows us to change the color of the fringing without affecting its lighting and texture. So there's still light and dark areas that are showing through. And I think this looks really nice. Here's the before and after. That color looks way more natural. So I'm just going to go around and sample hair colors that are nearby, and I'll continue to paint to remove the pink fringing. As you do this, be careful to just paint on the very edges of the fringing so that you don't affect the hair's natural color. So to conclude this video, I think the clone brush works really well to remove fringing, but it can be a little bit tricky with certain hair types. So an alternate option is to use this color blend mode technique, which I think is pretty easy and fast to do. It might not always look as natural as cloning, depending on how bad the fringing is. So that's why I think it's a good idea to know both techniques, cloning and the color blend mode. I'll just show you one last time the complete before and after before, after. I think This looks great. In the next video, we're going to continue learning more about defringing using simple painting. 19. Painting: Let's learn how to paint away fringing. This will be a really simple example. Sometimes you have clip art like this, and you want to remove the white background. So let's use the Flood Select tool. I'll just click to make that selection, and then I'll add a mask. This is the opposite of what we want. So I'll start by deselecting with Command or Control D, and then I'll invert our mask by pressing Command or Control I. Now, you can see we've removed the white background, but I want to show you that there's actually some hidden fringing left behind. Let's go to the top of the screen two layer, and then down to new fill layer. And let's just make this fill layer black. Now, as we zoom in, you can see that we have white fringing left behind all over this. So to fix this, I'm going to add a new pixel layer, and I'll make it a child layer to our background layer. Then I'll grab the paintbrush tool, and all we need to do is sample the colors and paint. Since this clip art has very flat colors, we can easily just sample the color and paint over the edges without worrying about messing up the design. So I'll hold Alt or option, and I'll click to sample the color, and then I'll paint over the edges. Since this pixel layer is a child layer, we don't need to worry about painting outside of the lines. So this technique is super easy. I'm going to increase my hardness and size of my brush to paint a little bit faster. All right. And just like that, we've fixed all of the white fringing on this image. Here's the before and after. This looks way better. Sometimes you don't need to get fancy and use the color blend mode. You can just paint in situations like this. So far, we've learned how to use the clone brush and paint from the paint brush to help with fringing. In the next few videos, I want to show you how you can paint adjustments over your photos to help with fringing. 20. Curves: This video, I'll show you how to use Curves to fix fringing. To begin, let's make a selection using the Object Selection tool. I'll click Refine in the Context tool bar, and then I'll paint over the edges of her hair. With that done, I'll press Apply. I'll add a mask, and then I'll deselect with Command or Control D. I'm just going to add a fill layer, so I'll go up to the top to layer, new fill layer. And then I'll drag this underneath everything. With that fill layer in place, I can see our selection a little bit better, and I can see that we've missed a few areas. So I'll select the mask layer and the paint brush, and I'm just going to paint in white paint to add these areas back in. Now, on this side, we're missing a large chunk of her arm right here, and it's a little hard to tell where to paint. So I'm just going to paint a little bit too much. Then to keep the edge nice and soft, I'll lower the hardness and I'll press X to switch my paint color to black so that I can remove this. For this photo, the original background was very dark. So the edges of our selection are pretty dark as well. On this new white background, this doesn't look very good. We could try painting or cloning to remove this dark fringing, but there's an easier way. Since the edges look too dark, we can just make it brighter. So I'm going to go to our adjustments and I'll apply a Curves adjustment. I'll increase the brightness. I'll make this brightness a child layer. And since I want to paint this just over the edges, I'll invert this with command or control I. So now you can see we have a black mask. So we need to paint in white paint to reveal the brightness on the edges. I'm going to paint with a lower flow just so I have a bit more control over how this looks. I'll use a larger brush and white paint. So I carefully painted this around the edges, and you can already see that this looks a lot better. Here's the before and after. This makes a lot more sense with the background. I think I want to add a little bit more brightness to a few areas because if she's standing against a white background, a lot of that white would be bouncing on her reflecting light. So, for example, this area looks pretty dark. So I'm just going to brighten this up. And maybe I'll paint a little bit more brightness over her face, as well. And now you can see the before and after. She's a lot brighter, but that's reflected in her environment. I think that makes a lot of sense. I think I want to add another Curves adjustment to add extra brightness to the tips of her hair. Right now, they still look a little bit dark, so I think that would make it look a lot better. So I'll add another Curves adjustment. I'll brighten it up. It's been placed as a child layer, which is perfect. So I'll just press Command or Control I to invert it. And then I'll just paint this extra brightness over the tips of her hair. I think this extra brightness looks a lot better. Here's the before and after. But I think her hair still looks a little bit too sharp and spiky. So I'm going to click on the mask layer. And with black paint, I'm just going to softly paint over the hair to make the hair a little bit more transparent. So I'm just painting just on the tips. I have a low flow so that I'm softly painting this away. And I think that softness looks really nice. With that all done, now you can see how easy it is to use the Curves adjustment to fix fringing. In the next video, we'll use another adjustment, the HSL adjustment. Okay. 21. HSL: This video we'll see how the HSL adjustment can be used to help with fringing. Let's start off by removing the background. Since the background is a solid yellow color, I think the flood Select tool will be perfect for this. With this tool selected, I'm going to make sure that contiguous is turned off. That's because parts of the yellow background aren't connected to each other, so we need to make sure this setting is off. Then I'll click on the yellow background and drag until it looks like the whole background is selected. I think 15% looks pretty good for this, but it looks like we have selected a little bit too much since parts of the bracelets are also yellow. So I'm going to select the selection brush tool. Then I'm going to remove from our selection by holding Alt or option and clicking and dragging. So just painting over anything that isn't the background. All right. That looks so much better. I'll just come down here to her other bracelets and we can continue this holding Alt or option and then clicking and dragging over the areas. Okay, this looks pretty good, but I think I deselected this part of the background. So with a smaller brush, I'll just paint normally to make sure that's selected. Okay, it looks like we have the whole background selected now. So I'm going to apply a mask. I'll deselect with Command or Control D. And you can see this is the opposite of what we want. So with the mask layer selected, I'll just press Command or Control I. All right, that looks great. Let's add a fill layer so that we have a new background. And I'll drag this underneath everything. So now we can go ahead and zoom in to see if there's any fringing. Now, this photo actually doesn't have the normal fringing along the edges like our last ones. Instead, we have a little bit of a color cast here that's left behind from her original yellow background. And you can see that throughout the model. So I'm going to add an HSL adjustment to counteract this color cast. To do this, I'm just going to add an HSL adjustment. And I'll make sure to add this as a child layer to our subject. To make sure we're only targeting the yellow areas, I'm going to go into the yellow color channel. As I move the hue slider, you can see this actually affects a lot of her skin, and that's because skin has a lot of yellow in it. So I want to make sure to narrow the range that's being affected by moving these little circles around, as I move them inward, less and less of her skin will be affected. And if I click and drag in the center here, you can see we can customize this even more. I'm going to narrow the range a little bit more, and I'll move it just so those yellow areas are being affected. So now that we see, we're affecting the right area, I'm just going to move the hue slider. So when it's around zero, you can see that yellow. I'm just going to move it side to side to see which direction I should go in. And it looks to me like I should move this to the right. So I'll just move this to the right a little bit until the colors match. I think this is still a little bit too saturated, so I'm just going to lower the saturation slider. This looks like such a good color match now. I'll zoom out so that we can see how this looked before and after. This really helped with the yellow on the edges of her body, and it even helped with the yellow that was reflecting on her face right here. This is so nice because we didn't even need to paint anything. We could just target the color. Now, one thing I do want to point out is that since we affected these yellow areas, we also affected other parts of the photo that we might not have wanted affected. For example, take a look at these bracelets. Here's the before and the after. We've really dulled down the yellow areas. So to fix this problem, I'll just grab the paintbrush tool, and I'll make sure to paint in black paint to remove this. I'll increase my flow to 100%, just so I can paint this a little bit faster. And you can see this looks a lot better. Now we can double check before and after I don't see a change, which is perfect. So I'll just go down and do the same for her other bracelets, painting over all of the dull yellow areas. Alright, that looks so much better. I do want to point out one other area that was affected, and that's the drum. Here's the before and the after. The drum was reflecting a lot of the yellow background. So I think this actually looks nice for this picture. But if you wanted to, you could also remove this effect from the drum by painting it away in black. Okay, now that we've taken care of the yellow color cast, I just want to brighten the edges of her body since the new background is bright white. So I'll add a Curves adjustment. This has been placed as a child layer, which is perfect. And I'll just brighten this curve. I'll invert with command or control I. And then with a lower flow, I'll just paint in white paint around the edges of our subject. That looks a lot better. I think I'm also going to add a little bit more brightness overall, since she has more light shining on her now, and I can paint across the drum, as well. So now you can see we've added some subtle brightness. Here's the before and the after before, after. I think this looks nice. To finish this video, I think I want to add another HSL adjustment since we've dolled down her skin a little bit. Like I mentioned before, skin has a lot of yellow in it. When we decreased the saturation of the yellow, even though we were selecting specific areas, overall, her skin just looks a little bit desaturated now, and maybe part of that was the original picture was a little desaturated. So to fix that, I'm just going to add another HSL adjustment, and I'm going to make her skin more vibrant. To do that, I'll go into the main color channel, and then I'll increase the saturation. I think I'll also adjust the hue back and forth to see if this would help her skin at all. I think her skin naturally has a little bit of green bouncing on it, so I'm going to add a little bit of red, just a little bit to add a little bit more warmth. Alright. With that done, I'm just going to select all of these layers so that you can see the complete before and after fixing the color cast and making her skin look more vibrant. Alright. Great job. In the next video, we're going to continue working with the HSL adjustment for color changes. 22. HSL Color Changes: Let's learn another way to use the HSL adjustment for defringing. For this image, I want to change the color of her dress. So I'm going to use the Object Selection tool. I'll hover over our model, and then I'll hold Alt or Option to just select the dress with that selected. Now I'm going to add an HSL adjustment. And now I'm going to change the color of the dress. So I'll just move the hue slider over. Maybe I'll desaturate it a little bit. Okay. This looks like a really nice color. I'll deselect with Command or Control D. And then we can zoom in and take a look at our mask. So I can see a few areas were missed. So I'll grab the paint brush, and with 100% flow and 0% hardness, I'm just going to paint in white paint along any edges that I see that should be pink. So I'll just adjust the size of my brush as I go painting over these edges. If you ever paint too much, remember that you can change your color to black and paint things away. As I've painted the edges, I've wondered about these pink areas underneath her sleeves. I think those are supposed to be her skin. So I'm going to paint in black paint to remove those areas. Okay, this looks pretty good. Here's the before and after. But one area that really does not look good is the yellow that's reflecting on her arms. So let's apply another HSL adjustment. Since I only want to affect the yellow on her arms, I'm going to go to the yellow channel. I'll move the hue slider so that we can see what we're affecting. I can see that we're affecting quite a bit of her skin, even areas that don't have the yellow reflecting on them. So once again, I'm going to tighten up this range by moving these circles in. And then I'll just move this whole thing from side to side to make sure we're just affecting those areas. Now, this is a little bit tricky. You can see as we're targeting the problem areas, some of this up here is also being selected. So we might have to do a little bit of manual painting. Just make sure that all of these yellow areas on her arm are included in the selection. Okay, now that we've targeted the area, I'm just going to move the hue slider so that it makes more sense. At zero, we can see a lot of yellow. And as I move it to the right, it looks more like it's reflecting the pink color on her arms. I think I'll desaturate this a little bit. To me, this looks a lot more natural. So let's take a look. Here is the before and after of the yellow on her arms. And as we go up here, we can see this also affected parts of her upper body. But I actually think these areas look nice for this picture. So I'm going to leave that. But if you wanted to, you could paint in black paint to remove that from a few areas. With that, now you can see, we've changed the color of her dress, and we've removed that yellow fringing on her arms. Great job. I just have one last defringing technique to show you in the next video. 23. Shrink Selection: Let's learn how to shrink selections to remove fringing. I want to remove the sky from this image. Since the sky is mostly one color, I'm going to use the Flood Select tool to do this. I'm going to make sure contiguous is checked off. Since there's a few parts of the blue sky that aren't touching. I'll click and drag until the whole sky is selected. I think 15% looks pretty good, but you can see that some of the pigeons are being selected. That's not very good, so I'll deselect with Command or Control D. And this time, we're going to add to our selection instead of just clicking once like this. So since we'll manually add some areas to our selection, I'll just check Contiguous on, and I'm going to lower the tolerance to 5%. I'll change this to add Mode, and I'll click a few times throughout the sky to get all of this selected. Then I'll zoom in and just manually click on these other blue sky areas. Now you can see we've selected all of the sky, and the pigeons are not selected, which is perfect. Oops, missed this area. Okay, now the whole sky is selected. With that done, I'm just going to add a mask. I'll deselect with Command or Control D, and then I'll invert the mask with command or control I. Okay, this looks pretty good. Let's add a new fill layer to the background. I'll drag this underneath, and we can zoom in to see how our selection looks. This looks pretty good. Let's try another color. Ooh, now it looks pretty bad. You can see blue fringing all around this statue. Now, technically, we could clone these areas, but that would be so tedious to fix this. So I want to show you another way. To begin, I'm going to duplicate our background layer. So I'll press Command or Control J. I'll double click and I'll rename this top layer DFringed I'll turn off the bottom layer. This part of the step isn't actually necessary, but I like to duplicate my layer so that I can see a before and after at the end. So we're just going to work on this top layer. To begin, let's hold Command or Control and click on the Layer icon. This will bring the selection back up. This time, I'm going to shrink the selection. So we need to go up here into our menus, go to Select, and then go down to where it says, grow shrink. This will bring up a dialog box that allows us to grow or shrink our selection by a few pixels. I'll zoom in, so you can see this better. As I lower this, you can see we shrink the selection, and as I raise this, we increase the selection. Now, I don't want this to be too extreme. So I'm just going to type in negative one, and then I'll press Enter. Then I'll zoom in a little bit more so that you can see the edges of our selection are a little bit jagged, since it goes pixel by pixel. If you want to smooth the edges, you can check on circular, which will smooth things out a little bit. I think this looks nicer. I'll apply this. And then to make things even smoother, I'll go up to the Select menu one more time, and then I'll go down to where it says feather. This is the same as feathering in the refined selection dialog box. I just want to feather this just a little bit, so I'll type one and then I'll press Enter and this will soften the edges nicely. I'll press Apply. And now with all of that done, we just need to make sure we have our mask selected. Then I'll grab the paintbrush tool. I'll press D for default colors. And now we can paint in black paint to remove the blue edges. Now, as you can see, if I start painting now, we'll be painting inside the edges, but I want to remove the outer edges. Because of this, we need to invert the selection, which is a new shortcut. Just hold command or control shift, I now you'll be able to paint on the outside edges. So you can see this really removes all of that blue fringing. I'll just zoom out. And since we want this painted on our entire selection, I'm going to use a large paint brush. And with 100% flow and hardness, I'll paint this over the whole area. I'll deselect with Command or Control D. And now I'll just zoom in so that you can see what this looked like before and after before and after. This technique will always remove fringing since we're literally removing it from our selection. Now, whenever possible, I do like to use one of the other defringing techniques, since they fix the incorrect color without removing part of the photo. But when nothing else works, you can always use this technique to remove any fringing. With that, we're done with the defringing chapter. Great job. In the next chapter, we're going to work on a project together. 24. Select the Subject - Fancy Woman Project: Let's put our skills to the test and do a project. For this project, we'll remove the woman from her background and place her on a new white background. So let's go ahead and start by making a selection of the woman. I'm going to use the Object Selection tool, I'll hover over her. I'll click, and then we can go ahead and refine. Now, for this one, I'm going to paint around the edges of her hair. And I'm also going to paint her eyelashes. That looks a lot better. I'll press Apply. And now we can go ahead and add a mask. I'll deselect with Command or Control D, and then I'll add our white background. So I'll go up to the top two layer, and then down to New fill layer. This white looks perfect. So I'll just drag this underneath everything. And now we can go ahead and take a look at our mask. There's a little bit of yellow fringing around her hair that we'll take care of in the next video. Looking at the rest of the mask, I actually think this looks pretty good. But there is this problem area right here. So I'm going to go over to our layers. I'll click the drop down and select the mask. And then I'll select the paint brush tool so that I can paint this away. With a much smaller brush, I'm going to lower my hardness completely. And then I'm going to paint in black paint to clean up this area. I'm going to paint away a little bit too much. Then I'll switch my color to white so that I can add things back in. Now that we have our selection looking good, we're going to defringe the edges in the next video. 25. Defringing - Fancy Woman Project: This video will defringe the edges of our selection. Let's go ahead and start by cleaning up the hair. I'm going to add a new pixel layer, and I'll place it as a child layer to our background. Then using the paintbrush, I'm just going to sample some of the hair's color by holding Alt or Option and clicking on the hair. And then I want to show you what this looks like if I just paint straight on the hair. You can see this doesn't look very realistic, but if I change it to the color blend mode, then this actually looks pretty good. Here's the before and after. Much better. I'm going to continue to do this sampling colors and painting over the hair. And as I do this, I'm really trying hard to only paint over the fringing of the hair. If you paint too far into the hair, it's not going to look very good. So just painting the edges. And we can also paint the fringing off of the eyelashes. I used a color that I sampled for the hair, and I actually think this looks good. Okay, with that done, now we can see the before and after before and after. That looks so much better. To continue with our defringing, I want to clean up the edges of the dress right here. You can see a little bit of a yellow glow from the background. So I'm just going to hold Alt or option, and I'll sample, and then I'll paint over this area. You can see this doesn't actually look very good. It's adding a blue color to the dress. I think this dress is supposed to be black. I'll press Command or Control Z a few times to undo that painting. And this time, since the dress is supposed to be black, I think I'll just remove the color from this dress. To do that, I'm going to select the dress by going back to our background layer. Then I'll use the Object Selection tool and I'll hover over the dress. I'll hold Alt or Option to only select the dress, and then I'll click. And now with the dress loaded as a selection, I'm going to add the HSL adjustment. Then I'm going to lower the saturation to remove that yellow color. I'll deselect with Command or Control D, And now you can see the before and after. I think this looks so much better. Okay, the last thing I want to do with the fringing is I want to clean up the little bit of yellow that's being cast on her skin. To clean this up, I'm going to add another HSL adjustment, which I'll place as a child layer. Then let's go to the yellow color range and let's shift the hue so that we can better see what areas we're affecting. I'll just narrow this range in and move it around by clicking on the line and dragging. And I think something like that looks pretty good. We're getting the yellow areas that I wanted to effect. So let's go ahead and work here. I'll move the hue down until it matches the skin. I think around 18 looks pretty good for this. And then I'll lower the saturation. And now I'm just going to Zoom and you can see the before and after of that area. Reducing the yellow. Here's another look before and after. You can really tell on the edges right here before, after. I think that looks a lot better. With all of that done, we can see the complete before and after. And I'll just move down here before and after. These are subtle adjustments, but I think this looks a lot better for our white background. In the next video, we'll finish this project by fixing the lighting. 26. Lighting - Fancy Woman Project: Let's fix the lighting. If this woman really was on a white background, I think she would look brighter. So let's go ahead and start by adding a Curves adjustment. And I'll make it nice and bright. I'll invert this with command or control I. And then using the paint brush, I'll set my colors back to default by pressing D, and then I'll lower the flow of my paint brush so that I can gradually add this brightness. So I'm going to start by just adding the brightness around the edges. And then I'll go more interior here, and I'll add a little bit more brightness to a few areas. So she has a lot of brightness on her face that we can enhance. I also see a highlight here on her shoulder going down her arm and on her chest, and then a little bit on her hands, just looking for any bright areas to enhance. We can also enhance her jewelry if we wanted to, adding a little bit more brightness there. I think this looks pretty good. Here's the before and after making her fit the environment better. Okay, as one final finishing touch, I think adding this brightness has made her skin lose a little bit of its color. You can see the skin has less saturation than we would want. So I'm going to add another HSL adjustment. This time, I'll go to the main color channel, and I'm just going to increase the saturation. This looks pretty good. But let's see if adjusting the hue improves things. If I move it to the left, we're adding a little bit of green, which doesn't look very good. But if I move it to the right, we're adding a little bit of red, which adds warmth to the skin. I think I'll bring it up just a little bit. Not too far. Alright. I think this looks pretty good. I'll zoom in so you can see this better. Here's the before and after. I think this color looks really nice. To finish, I'm going to hold Shift to select all of the layers that are outside of our model, and I'll just bring them down as child layers just to keep things organized. And with all of that done, now we can see all of the changes we've made. Here's the before and after helping this woman blend into her new white background. With that, we're finished with this project. Great work. In the next chapter, we're going to learn how to use the Pen tool to make selections. 27. Polygon Mode: This chapter, we're going to learn all about the Pen tool. The Pen tool is very useful for tracing sharp, clean selections. And in this chapter, I'm going to show you the basics of how to use the Pen tool and then how to use the Pen tool for selections. We're going to start in this video by learning about the simplest mode, polygon mode. Let's go ahead and start by selecting the Pen tool, which you can find right here. Then we can come up to the Context toolbar and change the mode to Polygon Mode. Polygon Mode allows us to draw straight, clean lines. To do this, just click to lay down a point. And as you continue to click all the way around, you can see that we're creating a path to finish, I'll just click on the first point. And now we have this nice closed path. Now, you may have noticed that we have a fill color. You can go ahead and remove that right here so that it's less distracting. You can also remove the stroke color. It's very thin, but we have a little black line there. You can remove that here, as well if it's distracting as you're tracing. And finally, to turn this Pen Path into a selection, you can just go up to the Context Toolbar and click selection. And just like that, we've been able to trace out a selection. So it's pretty simple to use the Pen tool for this. I'll just deselect with Command or Control D, and then we can make a better trace for this picture. For this picture, I want to keep the frame, but remove the artwork so that we can put new artwork inside of the frame. So for this, I'm going to zoom in, and I'm going to trace around the edges. Now, as I do this, I want to show you another setting that I like, and that's called Rubber Band Mode, which you can find right here. This allows you to see a preview of what your line will look like once you place your next point, which I think is very useful. As I trace around this frame, I like to cut into the frame just a little bit to make sure that no parts of the picture are left behind in the end. Once the picture is removed, this will look a lot cleaner. I've laid down my last point, and I think I need to move this last point in a little bit to adjust any of your points. You can hold down command or control and then click and drag to move them around. So I'll just check that all of them look good. And with that, we now have our path traced. So I'm just going to go up here to turn this into a selection. Then we can go ahead and add a mask and I'll deselect with Command or Control D. Now, this is the opposite of what we want. So I'm going to invert the mask with Command or Control I. And now we can place a new image in this space. I'll go to the top of the screen to file, and then down to place. I'll insert this image and I'll click and drag to add it in. I'll place this layer underneath so that you can see we've replaced the artwork. I think this looks very nice. Now that you know all about the simplest mode, polygon mode, I'm going to show you how to trace curved objects in the next video. 28. Smart Mode: Let's learn about Smart Mode. Once again, I'm going to select the Pen tool. And then up in the Context tool bar, I'm going to change the mode. To get into Smart Mode, choose the second option here. I'm also going to turn on rubber band mode. Smart Mode allows you to place points around an object, and you can see that your line will naturally curve based on which direction you're moving in. You can see that we get a very nice clean, curvy shape when we use Smart Mode. I'll turn this into a selection, and then I'll deselect with Command or Control D so that we can try out tracing this elephant. So I'll just zoom in here, and I'll begin by laying down a point. Just like with the frame, I'm going to cut into the elephant just a little bit so that this looks more natural later. As I lay down my points, I'm going to try to lay down a point wherever the direction changes. So we have a curve and then it curves down. So I'll add a point here, then it curves back up, so I'll add a point here and so on. So I'm just looking for anywhere where we're changing direction. And whenever you have a little bit more of a sharp change in direction, I like to stay a little bit closer to create a more sharp turn and you can see that that looks pretty nice. Now, one thing that's pretty distracting is this default setting of having a fill color. So I'm going to remove that and I'll remove the stroke color so that we can really just see what we're tracing here. Again, we have a sharp corner. I'm going to place a point right before the corner. I'll place another point and another one. So you can see that by tracing these very close together, we're able to have more of a sharp corner. On the smooth edges, we can spread these points out a little bit more so that these curve naturally. So I'm going to continue to trace this all the way around, and I encourage you to practice tracing this elephant, as well. I think this elephant has a lot of good curves and contours that we can practice with, as well as some sharp corners that can be a little bit tricky. If you ever want to redo a point that you've laid down, just press Command or Control Z, and you can undo the point and start again. All right. Now that I'm done tracing that out, I'm going to turn this into a selection. And then I'll add a mask. I'll deselect with Command or Control D. And now you can see we have a very sharp, clean edge going all the way around this elephant. Go ahead and keep this image open because we're going to use it in the next video. We I'll show you how to soften the edges of a mask. And 29. Softening the Mask: This video, we'll soften the mask that we made in the last video. When you use the Pen tool to make a selection, the edges will look very crisp. This can look a little bit unnatural. So I'm going to show you how you can soften this harsh edge. To do this, first, let's go to our filters. And then let's apply the Gaussian blur filter. When you increase the radius of the Gaussian blur, you can see things start to look very fuzzy. I only want the edges of the mask to become blurry like this. So I'm going to open up our layers, and I'm going to place this as a child layer to the mask. Now you can see the only thing that's getting fuzzy are the edges of the mask. From here, we can adjust the radius so that it has the softness that we want for our picture. Here's the before and after of this. And just like that, we've softened the mask nice and quick. Now that you know how to use the Pen tool, we're going to learn how to combine the Pen tool with other selection tools in the next video. 30. Combining Selection Tools: Let's combine selection tools in this video. So the Pen tool is really nice to use for objects with hard edges. Like in the examples that we've seen so far, it wouldn't work very well to use the Pen tool for selecting someone's hair or the soft edges of a sweater. But sometimes we do have an area on a person that has hard edges like the shoes. So let's see how we can combine our selection tools and the Pen tool to make a perfect selection of this person. To begin, I'm going to grab the Object Selection tool. I'll hover over the person, and I'll click. There's no hair to refine, but I am going to select the selection brush tool, and I'll just zoom in to make sure everything is selected the way we want. This seems to have done a pretty good job. I'm just going to go through and add a few areas. Don't worry about the shoes. We're going to trace those in a minute. But for now, I think I'll hold Alt or Option to remove this area. And everything else looks really good. So with that done, I'm just going to add a mask. I'll deselect with Command or Control D, and then I'll go to the top of the screen to layer new fill layer. I'll drag this underneath, and now we can take a look at our mask. For the most part, this did a pretty good job, but the shoes are a bit of a mess. That's because in the original picture, it's a little tricky to see where the shoes are and where the shadows are. So we can manually clean this up ourselves using the pen tool. I'm going to leave the mask turned off as I grab the pen tool, change it to Smart Mode and rubber band mode. And I'm just going to start by tracing around the outside edges of our shoes. I'll start up higher. And bring our trace down. For this sharp corner, I'm going to do a few points like that, and then I'll continue around cutting into the shoe slightly. Because of the way the layers were selected when I started, it looks like this has been placed underneath everything. I'm going to raise it up so that you can see we have these annoying colors again. You can just remove the colors like this and continue tracing. This area gets a little difficult to see, but I'm just going to give it my best guess cutting across like this. Once I've traced all of the shoes, I'm just going to go up the pant leg a little bit more. Before turning it around and tracing all along the outer edges of the shoes. I'll turn this into a selection. And now we can turn the mask back on so that we can paint to clean up the mask. I'll select the mask, and I'll select the paint brush tool. I'll press D for default colors. And I'm going to start by painting in black paint. I'm going to be a little bit more careful as I get more up the pant leg because I don't want to remove parts of the pant leg. Okay, that looks pretty good. To make sure the rest of the shoe is included in our selection, I'm going to reverse our selection with Command or Control Shift I. Now we can paint inside of the shoes. So I'll press X to switch to white paint, and I'll just paint this to make sure all parts of the shoe are included in our selection. I'll press Command or Control D so that you can see how clean the selection looks now. That looks so nice. We just have one last area to clean up, so I'll turn off the mask. I'll select the Pen tool again, and I'm just going to trace this area starting up higher and bringing it down. Once again, we have these annoying colors blocking the way. I wish this wasn't the default. I'm just going to remove the colors so that I can continue. Okay. And with that all traced, I'm just going to connect this like this. I'll turn it into a selection. I'll turn the mask back on and select it. And now we can paint in this area. So with the paint brush, I'll press D for default colors and X to switch to black paint so that I can start by removing this inner area. I'll press Command or Control Shift I to reverse our selection so that we can paint inside of the shoes. I'll press X to switch to white paint, and I'll paint to make sure all of this is included. I'll press Command or Control D to deselect. And now you can see what a difference this has made. The shoes look way better. But just like we saw in the last video, the edges are a little bit crisp, especially when you compare them to the softer edge of the pant leg up here. So let's blur the edges of the mask to fix this area. I'm going to go to our filters, and I'll apply the Gaussian blur filter. I'll place this as a child layer to our mask and then I'll increase the radius to soften this. I'll close out of this. And you can see that we've blurred the edges of the entire mask, but I really only want to blur the edges of the sharp Pen tool path. So I'm going to invert this layer with command or control I so that I can paint this in white paint just over the areas that need it. Comparing this side by side with the rest of the edges, I think I may have blurred this a little bit too much, so I'll click to open up the radius again, and I'll just lower this just a little bit so that we have a subtle soft edge to this mask. Here's the before and after of softening the edge. With that finished, now we're done learning about Pen tool selections. Great job. In the next chapter, we're going to do another project together. 31. Select the Subject - Cool Dude Project: In this chapter, we're going to do a project together so that we can practice the Pen tool a little bit more. To begin, we're going to select the subject in this video. So let's go ahead and start by selecting the Object Selection tool, and then I'll just hover over our subject, and I'll click to Select H. We need to refine his hair, so I'll click refine, then I'll zoom in and I'll paint over the edges of his hair. With that looking better, I'll just press Apply, and then we can go ahead and add a mask. I'll deselect with Command or Control D, and then we can go ahead and add a new blank background. I'll click New Fill Layer. This white color looks perfect. I'll just drag this underneath. And now we can take a look at our selection. This looks pretty good, but we do have some areas missing. So I'm going to select our mask. Then I'll select the paint brush so that we can paint in white paint to add those areas back in. Don't worry too much about these edges. We're going to clean them up a little bit more later. I just want to make sure that the whole bottom edge is included. Okay. Now that the subject is selected, in the next video, we're going to improve this mask using the Pen tool. 32. Improve the Mask - Cool Dude Project: Let's improve the mask in this video. So in the last video, we noticed that these edges didn't look very good. We can fix these edges using the Pen tool to get a very accurate, sharp edge. To better see the edge of his jacket, I'm going to turn off the mask layer. That way, we can accurately trace along the edge. So I have my Pen tool selected, but I do need to change the settings. I'll change it to Smart Mode with rubber band Mode turned on. And I'll begin by clicking outside of our subject here. And then I'll click all around the edge. I don't like these colors here, so I'm just going to remove the stroke and fill color, and I'll continue tracing this. I'm removing a little bit too much of the jacket just to make sure that the background is completely removed in the end. When we get to this fuzzy collar area, this collar is made of different material. I think it looks nice that it's fuzzy, so I'm just going to avoid clicking that area. Bringing the selection all the way around. Then I'll just turn this into a selection so that we can paint on our mask. I'll turn the mask back on, and I'll select it. And then I'm going to grab the paint brush tool, and I'll begin by pressing D for default colors and X for black paint. That way, we can paint in black paint along the edge here to remove anything in our selection here. Then to paint on the other side, I'll invert this selection with command or control shift I now we can paint on the other side, and I'll press X to paint in white paint so that we can add all of that back in. I just need to be careful up here. That looks pretty good. And I'll press Command or Control D to deselect. You can see this edge is a lot cleaner. So let's repeat this on the other side. Once again, I'll turn off the mask so that we can see what we're doing. I'll select the Pen tool. Luckily, it's saved our settings up here and I'll begin tracing, starting on the outside and removing a little bit too much of the jacket to make sure the background is fully removed. I'll remove the colors once again. I wish it would remember that. And we're just going to keep tracing placing points everywhere that the jacket changes direction. I'm not sure if this is part of the jacket. I think it might be, but I don't like how it looks. So I'm going to trace around that like this, and then I'll close my selection. You can always make decisions like that to clean up the mask however you want. I'm just going to turn this into a selection now. I'll just turn the mask back on, and I'll select it so that we can use the paint brush to clean up our mask. I'll press D for default colors. And to begin, I'll press X for black paint so that I can remove everything in our selection. Now we can invert the selection with command or control shift I so that we can paint on the other side. So now I want to add the jacket back in, so I'll press X for white paint, and I'll just paint along the edge to make sure all of that is included. I just need to be careful over here using a little bit of a smaller brush so that I don't paint too much. I'll press Command or Control D, and now you can see this jacket selection looks so much better, but it might look a little bit too sharp. When you compare this nice crisp edge to the fuzziness of the rest of our selection, it looks a little bit too clean. So I'm going to add a Gaussian blur to soften this edge. I'll go to our filters. I'll apply the Gaussian blur, and I'll drag it as a child layer to our mask so that it's only affecting the edges. I'll just raise this up until I like the look of that softness there. Then I'm going to invert this with Command or Control I. So right now, this blur is not being applied to anything. So now all I need to do is paint in white paint just along this leather jacket edge to add the blur here. I don't want to add the blur everywhere on our selection. Otherwise, the hair would look a little bit strange, just to give you a preview of this. If I hover my brush over the hair, you can see everything becomes fuzzier, and I don't want that. I just want the edges of the jacket to get fuzzier. This looks so much better. Here's the before and the after of adding that softness. Okay, with that finished, now we can go ahead and check how our selection is looking because honestly, I think this looks really good on this white background. But I do want to show you what this would look like if you decided to change your background color. So let's just grab the move tool, and then we can make this a darker color. Now you can see, we have quite a bit of work to do. There's fringing all over the edges. So in the next video, we're going to practice so many defringing techniques to clean up all of the edges. 33. Defringing - Cool Dude Project: This video, we'll practice tons of defringing techniques. To begin, I want to fix the colors that are reflecting on our subject. Mainly, I want to fix his white shirt and his black jacket. There's a lot of color reflecting on these surfaces, so I think it would look better if we just removed all of the color there. To begin, let's make a selection of those areas. I'll select the subjects layer, and then I'll use the Object Selection tool. I'll hold Alt or option to select his jacket and his shirt. That did a pretty good job, but I'm going to use the selection brush to add in the missing areas. Now with that selected, I'll go to our adjustments, and I'll apply the HSL adjustment. I'm going to lower the saturation slider all the way to remove all of the color from these selected areas. I'll press Command or Control D to deselect. And now you can see the before and the after. I think this looks so much better, especially for this gray background. Let's continue defringing by fixing the jaw and neck areas right here. For this, I'm going to use our clone brush technique. Let's add a new pixel layer set as a child layer to our subject. Then I'm going to select the clone brush, and I'll make sure it's set to current layer and below. Then we can hold Alt or option to sample a nearby area, and then we can paint along the edges to remove this bright fringing. Sample as you go to make sure you're painting the right area I think that looks pretty good. Let's continue up the neck, sampling a nearby area and painting all the way up. It's tricky right here because you don't want to sample the beard color. So sample the skin that's nearby. That looks better. And for the beard, we can sample a nearby area to paint those hairs. Go ahead and stop once you get to the ear. Let's repeat this on the other side. Sampling a nearby area to paint this away. And I'm trying really careful just to paint on the fringing so that I don't mess up the pattern that this jacket has. For the beard, I'll sample a nearby area as well, painting all the way up to the ear. Now you can see the before and after of this. I think that looks so great. For this next part, we're going to remove the fringing on his ears. Now, since ears don't have any hairs sticking out, they are very smooth. I think we can use a different technique. This time, we're going to shrink the selection to paint away the fringing. To do this, I'm going to hold command or control, and I'll click on our subjects Layer icon. Then I'll go to the top of the screen to select and then down to grow shrink. As a reminder, you can raise the radius to grow the selection or lower it to shrink it. I'm going to type in negative five and I'll press Enter, and then I'll apply this. To make sure this selection is nice and soft, I'll go back up to the top to select, and then I'll go down to feather. I'll just type in one and press Enter, and then I'll press Apply now we can select the mask so that we can paint away this fringing. I'll grab the paint brush, and I'm just going to paint in black paint to remove the fringing. Now, you can see if I begin painting right now. We'll be removing the ear. I want to remove the other side of our selection. So I'll invert this with command or control shift. So now you can see as we paint, we'll remove the fringing. Just make sure to use a smaller brush as you get close to the subject here. All right. That looks really nice. Let's continue this on the other side. I'll press Command or Control D to deselect. And I think this looks so good. Let's continue removing the fringing by removing the fringing on his hair. I think the clone brush technique would work really well for this. So I'm going to add a new pixel layer set as a child layer to our subject. I'll select the clone brush, and I'll repeat this technique sampling really close to the edge and painting just over the fringing. Feel free to sample as much as you need to as you go. You want to make sure these colors are as accurate as possible. For this spiky area, I find that just sampling down here in this darker area actually looks pretty good to remove this fringing. And then as we go over here, again, I'm just going to sample as close as I can to the edge to remove this. Okay, now you can see what this looked like before and after. So much better. To finish, I want to remove the strange colors on his glasses right here. To do this, I'll add a new pixel layer, and I'll set this to the color blend mode. With this set to the color blend mode. Now I can sample the color of his glasses with Alt or option, and then I'll click. And then we can just paint over his glasses to remove those colors. Here's the before and after. Alright, with that finished, now you can see that this looks really good on this gray background. And since we did so much great work on defringing, we can actually change the background color to any color, and our subject will look good on all of these colors. Now, for this project, I do want the background to be set to white because in the next video, I'm going to show you how you can make this dark subject look a lot brighter to blend in with a white background. 34. Lighting - Cool Dude Project: Let's fix the lighting. So we can see that our subject needs to be a lot brighter. Let's begin with our subjects selected, and then I'll add a Curves adjustment to make sure that we're just brightening our subject, not the background. I'll place this as a child layer. Then I'll raise this up to brighten our subject. You can see this already is a big improvement. To add even more brightness, I'll duplicate this layer with Command or Control J. This is too much brightness on our entire subject. So I'm going to invert this with Command or Control I so that I can paint this just where I want a little bit of extra brightness. So in white paint and a nice low flow, I'm just going to paint this over a few areas, starting with the edges. I think this would also look nice to add a little more brightness to areas that should be bright. The left side of his body has a lot more brightness, so I'm going to add even more brightness there. Now he seems a little unbalanced. Maybe I'll add a little brightness to the other side, as well. Here's the before and after. I think that was a little too strong, so I'll lower the opacity. But you can see that this little bit of added brightness helps him to blend in with his background even more. Now that we've brightened him, I think his skin looks a little bit too orange. We can easily fix this using the white balance adjustment. I'm just going to change this slider so that it's more blue toned. And you can see that helps take care of a lot of that orange. Here's the before and after, toning down that orange color. With that, we're done with this project. We were able to use the Pen tool to clean up the edges of his jacket, and we reviewed so many defringing techniques. This was such a great practice project. In the next chapter, we're going to do another really fun project where we're going to work a little bit with adding shadows. 35. Select the Subject - Gingerbread Man Project: This chapter, we're going to do a really fun Gingerbread Man project. To get started in this video, we are going to select our subject. So let's go ahead and start with the Object Selection tool. I'll hover over the gingerbread cookie to select it. There we go. Then I'll add a mask. I'll deselect with Command or Control D, and we can go ahead and finish by adding a white background. I'll go to new fill layer, and I'll drag this underneath. Let's zoom in to see how our selection turned out. Honestly, this looks really messy. All of the edges have a very fuzzy quality to them. I don't like how this looks. So I think it would be better if we just traced this cookie using the Pen tool. So let's go ahead and delete this mask and start again. So let's select the Pen tool and let's change the settings to Smart Mode and rubber band mode. Then we can zoom in and trace around the cookie. Remember that if you have any sharp turns, you can just place the points closer together to make it a more smooth, natural transition. So just continue placing points all the way around. Okay, I just finished tracing all the way around. I tried my best to preserve the little bumps and lumps around the cookie to make it more natural. With that finished, I'm just going to turn this path into a selection, and then I'm going to add a mask. I'll deselect with Command or Control D. And you can see this looks a lot better than the fuzzy objects selection tool selection. So this is a big improvement. But I do think this looks a little bit too sharp. So to add some softness to the edge, I'm going to go to our filters, and I'll apply a Gaussian blur. I'm going to make this a child layer to the mask layer, and then I'll raise the radius. Since I want the edge all around the cookie to be blurred, we don't need to do any painting. This looks great just as is. So now that we have our subject masked, we can go ahead and move him around wherever we want. Just select the main layer and then unlock it by clicking on the lock icon. Then we can go ahead and use the move tool to rotate him around. He is a little bit crooked right now. So I'll just hover over the rotation point, and I'll click and drag to straighten him out. Now you might be seeing little lines popping up around here. Those are the very edges of our mask showing up to get rid of those edges, all we need to do is grab the paint brush and paint in black paint. So I'll press D for default colors, and I'll paint in black with full flow just to remove any of those lines we see. That's just something that happens sometimes with masks. But now I think our cookie looks really good. So we can go ahead and move on to the next video where we'll fix the lighting. And 36. Lighting - Gingerbread Man Project: Let's fix the lighting in this video. Normally, our next steps would be cleaning up the mask, but we already have a perfect mask since we used the Pen tool. And then we would fix any fringing. I don't see any fringing on this one, especially because we used the Pen tool. So let's jump into the next step, which is lighting. To begin, I'll add a Curves adjustment. Since the cookie is now on a white background, it looks a little bit too dark. So I'll just raise this to brighten everything. Another thing I like to do to help things blend into the background is brightening or darkening the edges. Since this is a bright background, let's brighten up the edges. And I want to show you a little trick to do this. Go ahead and hold down Command or Control and click on the Gingerbread Man layer. This will load the mask as a selection. Then we can go ahead and shrink our selection. As a shortcut, you can press Command or Control B instead of going up to the Select menu. Then I'm just going to shrink this down. Let's shrink it to somewhere around negative 50. Then press Apply. With the selection still up, let's add another Curves adjustment. I'll just raise this up to brighten it. And then we can deselect with Command or Control D. Right now, it looks like the edges of this cookie are nice and crispy. This is the opposite of what we want. I want the edges to be brighter. To do that, all we need to do is invert this layer with command or control I. Now just the edges are brighter, but they look a little strange and sharp. So let's add a Gaussian blur to this to soften the edges. I'll raise the radius, and you can see we're blurring everything. Let's just place this as a child layer to the Curves adjustment. So only the Curves adjustment is being affected. Now as I raise the radius, you can see we're only affecting those bright edges. And I think this looks pretty good. Here's the before and after of brightening up the edges of the cookie. To finish with the lighting, I'm going to add one last Curves adjustment so that we can manually paint on any other lighting that we want added. This has been placed as a child layer. I'll just raise that out. So now you can see this is affecting everything. I'll invert this with Command or Control I, and then we can paint with a low flow in white paint just over the areas we want brighter. I'm going to brighten up the face and a few of the shadowy areas just to make everything look a lot brighter and nicer. We had to do a lot of brightening to make him match the background. And after all of that lightning, I think his color looks a little bit dull. So let's go back to our adjustments and apply an HSL adjustment. Then we can increase the saturation to bring back some color. Can also adjust the hue slider. I like to move this back and forth to see what looks better. I think raising this looks better to give him a little bit more red coloring. That looks really nice. Now I'll just hold Shift to select all of those layers that we just worked on so that we can see the before and after. I think this looks so much better for the white background. In the next video, we're going to learn how to make a shadow, to make the gingerbread man lay nicely on this new surface. 37. Make the Shadow - Gingerbread Man Project: This video, I'll show you how to make the shadow. After you've cut out your subject, adding a shadow behind the subject is actually pretty simple. But first, we need to fix our layers. Right now, all of our adjustments are sitting on top of everything, which means that all of these brightening layers and the color layer are also affecting the background. This will make it harder to see the shadow once we add the shadow. So to fix this, I'm going to click and drag to make all of these layers child layers. Now that all of these layers are inside of this group, I'm just going to select the top layer, the main group layer. And then I'm going to go down here to where it says FX. These layer effects options are really nice for adding different sorts of effects, but the most common one is the outer shadow. Go ahead and select the outer shadow layer and then check it on now we can go ahead and adjust these sliders. And as we adjust them, you can see that all of them basically make the shadow more intense. So you can change the radius, which will change the overall size of the shadow. The offset will change how far away the shadow is from your subject. And you can see the intensity is making it harsher or softer. I'll keep this all the way down so that we have a nice soft shadow, and I'll also lower the opacity to make it less intense. And just like that, you can see we have this great shadow added to our subject here. To improve the shadow even more, we can manually darken a few areas using the paint brush. So I'm going to add a new pixel layer placed underneath the main group. That way, the paint doesn't show up on our subject. It just stays behind the subject. Now using the paint brush, I'm just going to paint in black paint to add a little bit of a darker shadow. I'm going to darken right down here, just to give the cookie a little bit more weight on the bottom. We can also add more darkness to other areas if you'd like us to increase the intensity. To make this painting look more natural, we can add a Gaussian blur to this layer. Then we can go ahead and select the whole layer and lower the opacity to make it softer. Here is the before and after of that painting. To finish our shadow, I'm going to make one more layer. And this time, I'm going to make a contact shadow. This is the shadow that's closest to the edge of our subject, wherever the subject is making contact with the ground. So I'm just going to keep this very close to our subject. And I'm just going to paint this around the edges that have the shadow. Now that we have that painted in, I'm just going to lower the opacity of this one. And you can see the before and after. I'll zoom in so you can see that better before and after, darkening the closest edge. With that, now we have this beautiful shadow added. It looks very natural and nice. In the next video, we'll finish off this project by adding a fun, colorful background. 38. Add a Fun Background - Gingerbread Man Project: Let's add a fun background. I want to add a little bit more color into the background. I like the brightness, but I think the stark white is a little bit too stark. I'm going to select the move tool and then I'll select this fill layer so that we can change the color. I want to give this a light orange color. I'm going to change the hue over into the oranges. Then I'm going to lighten this up by pulling this over. So now you can see, instead of bright white, we have this subtle soft orange color. I think this looks really nice, but we can take this a step further. Let's select the Pen tool and then change the mode to polygon mode. Then I'm going to click a point into the corner, and then I'll drag this down into the other corner and I'll connect it into a triangle. I'm going to fill this with a different color, staying in this orange coloring. I think I'm just going to make this a little bit darker. I can see we have a black stroke on this pen path, so I'll remove that so that only that fill color is left behind. I think this looks really good, but going from corner to corner is just a little bit too perfect. So I want to move these points, and I'll do that using the node tool. You can find that by clicking the little gray triangle next to the Pen tool and then selecting the node tool. I'm just going to pull this point up a little, and I'll pull this point down a little, making sure everything is still covered in this orange color. Okay. I think this new background is so cute. I just have one last adjustment that I want to make. By default, the shadow that we added with the layer of X panel is black. Black looks pretty good with most backgrounds. But since this background is such a light color, I think I want to soften this black color a little bit. To do this, I'm going to click on the FX next to our layer. Then right here, we can adjust the color. I'm going to click and drag on this color picker to sample the orange color that we added. This automatically makes the shadow that orange color. So I'm just going to change this slider right here to darken the color. I think a nice brown color like this looks a lot softer than the black color that we had before. You can see that if I take this all the way down. So stare at the shadow for a second. Here's the before with the black, and here's the after with the softer brown before, after before, after. I don't know about you, but I think this brown looks a lot more natural for this background. We also painted some black in a few areas to enhance the shadow. I want to make sure that these areas also have this nice brown color. So I'm going to select the rectangle tool. I'll click and drag to cover the entire gingerbread man. And then I'm going to make this the dark brown color. Then I'll place this as a child layer to the shadow layers. So we have two different shadow layers. Here's the first one. This is the contact shadow, so I'm not sure if we'll see a huge difference here, but here is the before and after. Not too big of a difference. I'm going to duplicate this with Command or Control J, and I'll make this a child layer to our other shadow layer. And I think this will be a much bigger difference. Here's the before and the after. So we have a nice soft shadow against this light background. I think all of this looks so good. And with that, we've now finished this adorable cookie project. In the next chapter, we're going to do another project where I'll show you how to keep an existing shadow. 39. Select the Subject - Keep the Shadow Project: This is going to be a really fun chapter. We're going to remove the background of a photo while keeping the original shadow. To start, let's make a selection of the woman and her shadow. I'll use the object selection brush, and I'll hover over the woman to make this selection. I also want the shadow to be selected, so I'll hold Alt or option, and I'll click to add the shadow, and I'll hold Alt or option down here, and I'll click to add this part of the shadow. Now I want to do a little bit of cleanup using the selection brush. I just want to make sure that everything is selected properly. So I'll start at the top, and I'll just paint over her fingers to make sure all of the fingers are selected. To remove from your selection, you can hold Alt or option as you paint. All right. With that looking good, I'll just continue going all the way around our subject to make sure everything is added properly. It's a little tricky in some areas since the background is this light orange color, take your time, making sure the shadow is fully included. Now that that's finished, I'm going to refine the hair. So I'll just paint all along the edges. I don't need to refine the hair in this area since we're including the shadow, but I will paint in this area right here. We can also refine the hair of the shadow. So I'm just going to paint over this area. And that looks a lot better. With that done, I'll press Apply. Then I'll add a mask. I'll deselect with Command or Control D. And then we can add a new background layer. So I'll go to layer, new fill layer, and I'll just drag this to the bottom. At first glance, this looks really nice. But I am going to grab the paint brush, and I'll just paint to clean up any areas on our mask that need to be improved. So I'll use black paint to remove the bits of background that are left behind. And I'll press X on my keyboard to switch to white paint to add any areas back in. Okay, that looks really nice. I think on this white background, this looks really good. But if we make the fill layer a different color, I just want to see how this looks. You can see with this different color, the shadow doesn't look very good. That's because for the original photo, the shadow was sitting on an orange background. So the shadow also has orange in it. I want this shadow to blend in to whatever color we choose for the background. But to do that, we'll need to recreate this shadow. So let's do that in the next video. 40. Recreate the Shadow - Keep the Shadow Project: This video, we'll recreate the shadow. To begin, I'm going to duplicate our fill layer with Command or Control J. Then I'll make this duplicate copy black. We're going to use this black layer for our shadow. To do that, I'm going to hold Command or Control, and I'll click on the woman's layer to load it as a selection. With the black fill layer still selected, I'm going to apply a mask to it. Then I'll deselect with Command or Control D. Right now, it looks like nothing changed. But if I turn off the woman's layer, you can see we now have this perfect silhouette of the woman and her shadow. When we turn her layer back on, you can see that she's covering this perfect shadow. So we need to remove the shadow from the woman's layer. To do that, I'll just select her layer, and then I'll use the Object Selection tool to make a selection of just the woman. Then we can select her mask, and we can paint with the paint brush with our default colors. I'll switch this to black paint. And then we can use this to remove the shadow. But right now you can see that we'd be painting away the woman. I want to paint away the shadow, so I'll invert this with command or control Shifte Now we can paint over her shadow to remove it from this layer. It looks like this black paint is being directly applied to our background, but I just want to show you that by painting in black, we are removing the shadow from the mask. That black you see is just the new shadow underneath. And don't forget there's a little bit of shadow down here as well. Alright. With that done, I'll deselect with Command or Control D. And now you can see we've removed the original shadow, and we're just left with this new black shadow. I'm just going to zoom in to make sure everything looks good with this. I think there are a few areas that I can clean up here, and it would be easier to see them if I turned off the shadow. So I'm going to paint directly on her mask now to clean up any strange areas that were left behind, switching to white paint as needed, really cleaning up this edge to make sure everything looks good. Alright. That looks so much better. I'll turn the shadow back on. At this point, I think the shadow looks good with its shape, but it's a little too intense. So I'll select the shadows layer, and then I'll lower the opacity. Then I'm going to change the background color, so I'll use the move tool. And then I'll just change these colors around so that we can see what the shadow looks like with different colors. As you can see, no matter what color we choose, this shadow looks really good. As a bonus, once you've decided on the color that you want to use, we can give the shadow a little bit of color to make it pop. To do this, I'll select the shadow layer, and I'll duplicate it with Command or Control J. I'll just turn off this extra layer now and we can change the color of this top layer. I'm going to sample the pink background color, and then I'm going to make it darker. We can also play with blend modes a little bit. I really like the multiply blend mode. And we can adjust the opacity. So now that we've added this really pretty pop of color to the background, if you do decide to change the color again, you can see this color doesn't really look right. So with this colorful shadow selected, I'm just going to sample this new background color, and we can go ahead and darken that. Okay, so now we have a much better shadow. All that's left is cleaning up her hair, which we'll do in the next video. 41. Refine the Hair - Keep the Shadow Project: Let's refine the hair. So at this point, the right side of her hair where the shadow is, is missing a lot of detail. So I want to show you a little trick. We can actually steal some of the hair from the left side, and we can bring it over here to add hair detail. So to get started, I'm just going to select the woman's layer, and then I'm going to duplicate it with Command or Control J. To make this simpler, I'm going to right click, and then I'm going to go down to where it says Rasterize. When you rasterize your layer, you'll combine the layers together. So in this case, we combined the mask with the woman to make one solid layer. Now with the move tool selected, I'll right click and then go down to where it says Transform, flip horizontal. So now we have two copies of our woman, and we can position the woman's hair in the place where we need it. To see this easier, I'll lower the opacity of this layer. And you can see that we have a lot of really nice hair to choose from. We can even rotate this layer a little bit to get it just right. I'll just increase the opacity again, and then we can apply a mask to this layer so that we can only paint on the areas that we need. So I'll add a mask, and then I'll invert this mask with command or control I. Now that everything's invisible, we can grab the paint brush. I'll press D for default colors and X for white paint. And now we can paint over this area. And you can see that we're just adding in hairs. I'm not sure what that is. I'll just press X to switch to black paint so that I can remove that. But you can see this looks really nice. We've added a lot of detail back in. If you want, you can even fill in this little gap here with more hair. That looks pretty nice. And now you can see the difference. Here's the before and the after fixing that detail in that area. With that, we're done fixing that hair, and we're done with this shadow project. Great job. Now, in this video, you've got a little sneak peek at working with hair. In the next two chapters, we're really going to focus on hair because it's a really difficult thing to make selections of. So we'll get started in the next chapter. Where I'll show you a bunch of techniques that you can use for selecting difficult hair. 42. Using a Drawing Tablet: This chapter is all about selecting hair. Hair is one of the most difficult things to select. So I want to finish this course by dedicating two entire chapters to talking about strategies for selecting hair. We'll get started in this video where we'll talk about using a drawing tablet to help with hair selections. Most things in Affinity can be done without a tablet, but tablets are very useful for working with hair. I use a simple Wacom tablet for this. I really like it, and it's pretty affordable. I would recommend getting the tablet in this pistachio color to save $30. I don't know why the price is different, since the pistachio one just has a little border of the color. Anyway, I'll leave a link to the tablet below this video. Using the tablet is super easy. All you need to do is plug it into your computer and hover the stylus over the tablet. You'll see the cursor on your computer. Follow wherever you place your stylus. When you're ready to click on something or draw, just touch the stylus to the tablet. It's just like drawing on a piece of paper. By the way, the tablet that I use is actually a bluetooth tablet, so you don't even need to plug it into your computer. I don't really like worrying about the battery on my tablet, so I do plug mine in every time, but you don't have to. Wacom tablets and most other drawing tablets come with buttons that you can program as shortcuts. So you could program a button to select the brush tool or the eraser. But to be honest, when I use the tablet, I never use the buttons. I just hold the stylus with my right hand, and I keep my left hand hovering over the keyboard so that I can use keyboard shortcuts as needed. That's just what I do. So I thought I would include that so now you know about drawing tablets, feel free to continue this chapter without a tablet. But if you do select hair often, I would recommend investing in one. It will be especially helpful later in the chapter. In the next video, we'll learn how to make custom brushes to help with hair selections. 43. Making Stamp Brushes: In this video, I'll show you how to create a super easy stamp brush. Because selecting every individual hair is incredibly time consuming and practically impossible, a wonderful workaround is painting hair back in. You can do this using regular paint brush, or if you want to get fancy, you can use a stamp brush to quickly stamp hairs back in So for this video, I'll show you how to make one of these stamp brushes that's super quick and easy to use. To make a brush an Affinity Photo, we first need a blank document to work on. So I'll go to the top of the screen to file, and then down to New. I'm going to make this a 3,000 by 3,000 pixels square, and then I'll press Create. On this background, we need to create the shape for our brush. Whatever shape we end up using, it needs to be completely black in order for the brush to work properly. So just to show you a sneak peak, here is what the goal is for this hair stamp brush. We want to isolate the hair, turn it black, and then place it onto this white background document. Now that you know what the goal is, let's take a look at the picture that I chose for this stamp brush. I'll go to the top to file, and then down to open. Go ahead and select the first exercise file and then press Open. I like this picture because the model has dark hair, and she's standing against a light colored background. This will make it easier to isolate the hair, since there's so much contrast between the hair and the background. To start, let's adjust the lighting with a Curves adjustment. It's easier to make adjustments to up the contrast here if you zoom into the hair. To begin, I'm going to bring the white level over, and you want to bring it over so that the background turns a lot whiter, but you're not frying the hair. You see how we're losing the detail. So I'll just pull this back until we can see the hair again. This looks like a good spot for it. I'll do the same with the black level, pulling it over until the details start to disappear. I think about here looks pretty good. I'm also going to raise the highlights a little trying to preserve the detail and make the background a little more white. Once the edges of the hair have really good contrast, you're done with this step. Next, let's work on the colors. I'll add an HSL adjustment. So remember, our goal is to make the hair black with a white background. Right now, the hair is pretty much black, but you can see some colors in the hair and the background. The main color that I see in the background is yellow. There's even some yellow fringing on the hair. We want this to look brighter so that it looks more white. So I'm going to go to the yellow channel. And then I'm going to use a slider that we don't normally use the luminosity slider. I'm going to raise this up until that yellow becomes a lot brighter. Honestly, I could raise it more to get rid of even more yellow, but we'll start to lose some of the detail in the hair. So I'll just raise it a bit like this. Now that the yellow is brighter, we can fully remove the color in the main color channel. So I'll just bring this saturation slider all the way down. And now you can see we have black hair, but the background is still kind of gray. We really need this to be white. So let's add another Curves adjustment so that we can target specific areas. For this, I'm going to add an S curve. You can see that this has increased the contrast, creating a wider background, but this is frying the hair. We're losing some of the detail that we need. So I think we need to paint this adjustment on to just a few areas. Maybe if we paint this with a low flow, it can give us the balance that we're looking for. I'll invert this layer with command or control I. Then using the paint brush, I'm going to paint in white paint with 0% hardness and a lower flow so that I can gradually apply this to the edges of the hair. Maybe I'll raise the flow a little bit higher. If you ever paint too much and start to lose detail, you can just switch your color to black to undo your painting. The goal here is just to brighten the areas without losing detail. Okay, now it's the fun part. We're going to paint in white and black paint over our image to just isolate the hair. So I'm going to add a new pixel layer on top of everything. Then I'm going to paint still with this lower flow. I'm just going to paint this white paint around the edges of the hair. Once you have the edges painted, you can increase the flow all the way and paint the rest of the background in white paint. We don't need her whole body. We just need her hair, so I'm going to remove most of her body. Now that we have the perfect white background, I'm just going to press X to switch to black paint, and I'm going to paint in black over the rest of our subject. Okay, so this is what we should be left with. We now have the symbol, the shape that we'll use for our paint brush. To bring this into our brush document, all you need to do is right click on any layer and then go down to where it says merge visible. This merges everything that we've done onto a single layer. So we can go ahead and copy this layer with Command or Control C. And then we can go back to our brush document and paste this in with Command or Control V. I'll just use the MO tool to place this into the document so that we can see all parts of this. Okay, so now that that's set up, let's export this file. I'll go to the top to file export, and then I'll export this as a PNG. Okay, so I just exported that PNG file. So now I'm just going to create a new document so that we can test our brush. So I'll just go to the top to file, and then new. I'll just keep these dimensions the same, and I'll press Create. To add this brush. First, we need the brushes panel. If you don't have the brushes panel, just go to the top of the screen to window and then down to brushes. Then you can just talk this over here by clicking and dragging on the word brushes. From here, we can click on the Hamburger menu, and then we can go down to where it says, New intensity brush. Then we can select the PN G file and we can open it up. So now we can use the paint brush. I'll just add a new pixel layer and I'll make sure that brush is selected. There we go. And now we can paint with it. You can see by default, this brush is so small. So I want to edit it so that whenever we use this brush, it's a lot larger. To do that, just right click on the brush and then click Edit brush. Now we can adjust the size of the brush. I think I want mine about 800 pixels, and then we can close out of this. Now, every time we open this brush, it'll look like this, which is a lot larger and better. You can actually see the details. If I zoom in here, you can see that this tiny one actually has very little detail, so I think this is a big improvement. One last thing I want to mention is that you can move this brush into a different category by right clicking on it, and then going to move to brush category. Then you can select where you want it to go. To create a new category, you can go to the Hamburger menu and then click Create New category. Then you can create a category just for your brushes if you like, and you can move every new brush into this category. So now you know how to make a stamp hairbrush and Affinity Photo. In the next video, I'm going to show you the best way to use a stamp brush. 44. Using Stamp Brushes: Let's learn how to use stamp brushes. Stamp brushes are perfect for adding more detail to your selection. So first, let's make a selection of our subject. I'll use the Object Selection tool and I'll click to select our subject. Then I'll press refine so that we can refine the edges of her hair. I'll press Apply, and then we can add a mask, I'll deselect with Command or Control D, and then I'll add a new fill layer. So let's take a look at how this turned out for the hair. Oh, not too good in this area. But the rest of the hair seems pretty good. Let's do a little bit of cleanup to remove any weird areas. I'll select the mask. Then I'll grab the paintbrush tool. You might have the hair brush still selected, so just choose any of the basic brushes and make sure you're painting with 100% flow and 0% hardness. Now, I'm just going to zoom in, and mainly I'm focusing on removing any hairs that shouldn't be there and adding hairs back in. But any smudgy areas like this, just remove them. At this point, if you see any weird areas, it really is better just to remove them. I think I'm going to remove this extra hair down here. Clean that up really quick. Okay. Now I think this looks a lot better, but we did just lose a lot of flyaway hair detail that make selections look really realistic. So I think it's time to use our stamp brush. I'll add a new pixel layer placed underneath our subjects layer. Then I'll scroll down to select the brush we made. I'll make it quite a bit larger just so it matches the size of our model here, and then I'll click. It looks like I painted in white paint. That's not really going to work, so I'll undo. Switch my color to black. There we go. And then I'll click to stamp this. Now we can use the move tool to adjust this. First, I'll right click and then I'll go down to transform, flip horizontal, just so it's oriented the right way. Then I'm just going to rotate this and I'll place this just so we can start to see the hairs poking out on this side. To further customize this, I like to use the mesh Warp tool. Click on the little gray triangle to open the tools and make sure you have the mesh warp tool selected. Using this tool, we can pull this out and push it in to customize how this looks. I want a little more detail in this area because I know this gap is strange. So I think this looks pretty good there. I'll also pull out a little bit of detail down here. I'm just trying to fill in the gaps. I'm not trying to add in a ton of new hair. So I'm just kind of pushing and pulling to get the right balance. Okay, I think that looks pretty good. I'm going to pull in this side, just to remove the hair that's sticking out over there since we don't need it. And I think this looks pretty good to add detail back to these areas. I'll just go to the top to press apply so that it saves the warping that we just did. To make the colors match a little bit better, we can paint directly on this layer. To do this, I'm going to hold command or control to load this as a selection. Then I'll grab the paint brush, and I'll paint with one of the basic brushes. I'll lower the hardness and I'll lower the flow a bit. And then I'm just going to sample some hair colors. To paint over these areas, I think this area needs to be lighter, so I'll sample a lighter color and paint that in. For this area, I do think I want to keep it dark, just to add a little contrast, maybe not quite that dark, though. You can paint with more than one color to add a little bit of variety. Using a low flow is nice because we can gradually add these different colors. You can even use a really small paint brush to add strands. Okay, I think that looks pretty good. We have a little more to go down here, lightning that area and lightning this area. I'll deselect with command or control D. And you can see all of that hair is blending a lot better now. Here's the before and after of adding that hair. So now you know how to make a stamp brush, and you have some techniques you can use to use a stamp brush. To finish this video, I want to show you that I've included multiple stamp brush files in the exercise files that you can import onto your computer. To import these brushes, go to the Hamburger menu of the brushes panel and then go down to import brushes. Select this file, the stamp hair brushes, and then press open. Go ahead and press Okay. And now you can see we have all of these great hair stamp brushes that you can play around with. I try to include lots of different hair types and hair lengths. And just as a tip, whenever you use these stamp brushes, remember to go back to the basic category to set your brush back to basic, just so you don't get confused as you try painting later on on different projects. Okay, with that finished in the next video, I'm going to show you how to make another type of brush for painting individual strands of hair. 45. Making Custom Brushes: This video, I'll show you how to make a custom brush. We already saw that the stamp brushes are very easy to use. But if you want to brush with a little more control, then we can create custom brushes. To create this brush, let's start with a new blank document. So I'll go to File New. I'll make this 3,000 by 3,000 like last time, and then I'll press Create. My goal for this brush is to create a brush for tight curls. To do that, I'm going to grab the paintbrush tool, and I'm going to make sure I'm painting in black paint with full flow and hardness. Then I'll make the brush quite a bit larger. And then on a new pixel layer, there we go. I'll click once to create this dot. Then I'm going to select the eraser tool. And once again, with 100% flow and hardness, I'm going to click to erase part office. We want this to be a very thin crescent moon shape. So I think I'll paint like that to erase that part. And then making my brush a little bit smaller, I'll just soften these edges. Maybe I'll make this a little bit more narrow. Hair is very thin, so I want to make sure that this looks very thin. Okay. To me, that looks like a little strand of hair now. To soften this even more, I'm going to go to our filters so that I can apply the Gaussian blur filter then I'll just raise the radius to soften the edges a little. We don't want our strands of hair to become too sharp. That looks pretty good. I'll close out of this. And now we can export this document. I'll go to the top to New, then down to export. And I'll make sure to save this as a PNG. Then I'll press Export. Now that we've exported that, I want to test this brush. So I'm going to go to the top to file new, and I'll create a new blank document to load our new brush. Up in the brushes panel, I'll click on the Hamburger menu, and then I'll go down to where it says, New intensity brush. We can select our file and open it up. And just like last time, I'm going to right click and then choose Edit brush. We've seen this dialogue box before when we adjusted the hair stamps default size, but there are a lot more sliders that we can change. As we change these sliders, I want you to pay attention to this up here. This is a preview of what our brush would look like if we click and drag to paint with it. Right now, this looks very uniform, but we know hair is a lot more random than this. So as we change these sliders, our goal will be to increase the randomness. To start in this general section, I'm going to increase the spacing. I think these hairs are way too close together. So I'm going to increase this to give each hair a little bit more breathing room. Then we can go into the dynamic settings. This is where we can adjust a lot more randomness. First, let's increase the size jitter. As I increase this, you can see that we have some hairs that are much smaller and some hairs that are much larger. I think this is pretty nice because hair usually has natural variation. But I don't really like how uniform this still looks. It gradually gets bigger and then smaller again. To make this more random, we can go over here and change this to random. That looks a lot better. As we're painting, hairs will randomly be larger or smaller. Next, we can change the accumulation jitter. This is similar to opacity. As I raise this up, you can see some of the hairs become more transparent. I think that looks pretty nice, so I'll bring that up. We can also adjust the flow, which is pretty similar. As I raise this up, more of the hairs will be transparent. And now we just have two more that I want to change. This rotation jitter is going to make such a big difference. As you increase this, the hairs will be rotated in different ways to make them look more random. So here you can see this one has the curve at the top, while some of these have the curve at the bottom. I think that looks so nice. The last one I want to change is scatter X. As I click and drag this, you can see some of the hairs will be more bunched together, while some of them are more spaced apart, and I think this looks much more natural. So I'll just bring this up a little bit. As I prepared for this course, I also experimented with scatter Y because I thought this would give us more randomness. As I change this, you can see that if we paint along a straight line, some of the hairs might land far away from your brush. This doesn't look very good when we're trying to have control over where we're painting the hairs. It creates this effect that there's a ton of scattered eyelashes everywhere instead of nice flyaway hairs that are connected to our subject. So I would say don't change that one. The settings that we changed are perfect for what we want. So I'll just close out of this now. Now I'll just add a new pixel layer. I'll grab the paint brush tool, and then we can test this brush. So you can see as I paint, we have very random hairs. This is going to look really nice on subjects that have very curly hair, and you'll see that more in the next video. To finish this video, I just want to mention that the changes that we made when we right clicked and then selected Edit brush, those changes are permanently applied to this brush. So even if we close down Affinity and open it back up, these random settings that we applied will always be saved on this brush. But if you ever want to temporarily change your brush just as you're using it, you can do that, too. To do that, just go to the Context toolbar and press on where it says more this opens this exact same dialog box so that you can change any of these settings here. Then you can close and paint with those new settings. And as long as you have this brush selected in this document, you can have those new settings. But as soon as you change brushes or close out of Affinity and open it again, those settings are not saved because you used the Context tool bar instead of the edit brush option. So I just wanted to mention that in case you ever have a brush that you want customized, but only for the project you're working on. Okay. After all that work, we now have this beautiful custom brush, and we are ready for painting. So in the next video, I'll show you how we can use this new brush. 46. Using Custom Brushes: Let's use our new custom brush. So just like with the stamp brushes, custom brushes are great for cleaning up our selections. So let's start off by making a selection of our subject with the Object Selection tool. I'll click to make a selection, and then I'll refine the edges of her hair. Then I'll press Apply. I'll add a mask, and I'll deselect with Command or Control D. Now we can add a new fill layer. And we can drag this to the bottom. I'll add a new pixel layer, and I'll keep it where it is sitting above the background and below our subjects layer. We'll use our new brush to paint on this layer. So I'll grab the paint brush tool. Then I'll go to the brushes panel and I'll make sure that we have our new brush selected. I think Affinity did a pretty good job with selecting the hair, but we may have lost some detail in a few areas. So we can use the brush to fill in a few of these spots. To do this, hold Alt or option and click to sample a nearby hair color. Then we can make the brush a little bit larger so that it matches the size of the curls. Then we can paint. You can see as I paint in this area, we're filling in this sparse area. We can sample more colors, maybe a darker one to paint more hair in. And I just want to show you that if you want to manually adjust your brush, you can use the arrow keys on your keyboard to change how your brush is rotated before you click to paint. You can hold Shift as you use the arrow keys to move this faster and then click. So you can do that if you want a little bit more control over some areas. But in this case, I think I'll continue to paint just as we have been filling in some of these sparse areas and sampling new hair colors along the way. So I'm just going to continue to do this all around the hair. Make sure you pay attention to the sizes of the hairs as you're painting, because in some areas you might want to use a smaller brush to make it look more natural. I've now finished painting along the edges of the hair, and I want to show you what this looked like before and after, before and after. You can see these hairs blend really nicely. To make these hairs look even better. We can also blur the hairs a little bit to make them softer. I'll do this with a Gaussian blur. And then I'll raise the radius until it matches the hairs surrounding them. Just a little blur really does make a difference for this picture. So now that you know how to use this brush, I want to show you that I've included multiple hairbrush files in the exercise files that you can import onto your computer. To do this, just go to the Hamburger menu and then go down to where it says, import brushes. From here, go ahead and select the custom hair Bushes file and open it up. Then press Okay. These are really fun to play with. They're single strand, multi strand, and a wavy brush as well that you can play around with. And as a reminder, once again, when you're done playing around with these brushes, make sure to go back to the basic category and select one of these basic brushes so next time you're using Affinity, you don't get confused about the brush you're using. To finish off this chapter, in the next video, I'm going to give you a few important hair painting tips. 47. Busy Backgrounds: Let's learn a busy background technique. So far, I've shown you how to make brushes and use them. Now, in this video, I want to show you a technique that works perfectly for tricky situations like this one, where you're selecting hair on a busy background. When a background is so tricky like this, it's actually better to manually trace your selection using the Pen tool. The selection tools aren't able to make a clean selection, but you can. So go ahead and select the Pen tool and change it to Smart Mode and rubber band mode. Then we can zoom in and trace along the edges, cutting a little bit into our subject to make sure that the background is fully removed in the end. When you get to the hair, cut into the hair so that all of the hair is selected. You'll probably be cutting off quite a bit of the flyaway hairs, and that's okay. We just want to make sure that all of the background is removed. Okay, with that finished, I'm just going to turn this into a selection. Now we can go ahead and apply a mask, then I'll deselect with Command or Control D. And we can add a new fill layer. So now that we've made this super clean selection, we can refine the edges of the hair. To do this, I'm going to paint directly on our mask using the paint brush, and I'm going to change our brush to the custom hair brushes, and then I'll go down to the multi strand wide brush. So these are just the brushes that were included in the exercise files. I'll press D for default colors, and I'll make sure I'm painting in white paint by pressing X. And now all we need to do is paint along the edges of the hair to add more hair detail along the edges. So I'm painting in the direction that the hair is already going in, and I'm overlapping quite a bit to create clumps of hair. I'm going to do this all the way up the hair. Make sure you never leave hairs unconnected. I'm just going to go back a few times. Whenever you're painting hair, make sure the origin point is the hair itself. If hair is just floating on the outside, that doesn't look very natural. So make sure that it's always connected in some way to the subject's hair. This is a really good start. I'm going to switch to the multi strand narrow brush to add a few more clumps of hair. These hairs are a little closer together, so it's nice for adding some more density to the hair. Once you're done with that, you can use the single strand brush to add individual flyaway hairs. I think these hairs make it look a lot more realistic. Again, make sure that they're connected to the main hair. I think that looks so good. So let's do this to the other side, as well. I'll just use the same brushes once again, starting with the wide brush, adding in the narrow brush and finishing with the single strand brush. Okay, so this looks really good for the shape of the hairs. But as you can see, we're getting a lot of the background colors here and there to fix this. We can add a new pixel layer set as a child layer, and we can paint on this to add the right colors back in. To do that, I'm going to go back to the basic category, and I'm going to grab one of the round brushes. I'll set the hardness to 0% and I'll lower the flow. Then I'll zoom in here. I'll hold Alt or Option to sample the color of her hair, to paint over a few of these areas. To make this more natural, I'm going to sample lots of different colors as I go. I think if you can sample a lighter color for the flyaways, it makes the flyaways look softer and more natural. This area doesn't have much light colors around it, so I'm just going to go over here to sample this really light color, and I'm going to paint this over a few areas to soften the flyaway hairs. That looks so much better. Here is what it looked like before. And here's the after before, after. Okay, we're almost done. The last thing I want to do is I want to blur the edges of the mask. Not only does the hair look too sharp, but so do the edges of the rest of the mask. You can especially see this on her hat here. To blur the edges of the mask, I'll go to our filters, and I'll apply a Gaussian blur filter. Then I'll zoom into the hat. And we can just blur this until the edges start to look softer. Now, this is affecting everything. So I'm going to drag this as a child layer to the mask. That way, it's only blurring the very edges of our mask. I think I'll just blur this just a little bit. And you can see how that's really improved the hair and the edges of the mask. That's perfect. With that, we're done with this tricky background project. Now you have all of the brushes and the techniques that you'll need to select hair. In the next video, we're going to do a final project to practice everything that we've learned. 48. Make a Plan - Tricky Hair Project: In this video, we'll make a plan for our final project. So this person is standing against a plain background. So it makes it seem like this will be an easy selection. However, the background is so similar to her hair color. I think Affinity selection tools will have a really hard time with this. So instead of using the selection tools, let's use the technique that we learned in the last video and trace out our selection using the Pen tool. After that, we'll clean up the edges of our selection using our custom brushes. We'll do the same thing we did last time using both the multi strand brushes and the single strand brushes directly on the mask. In this video, I also want to try using a stamp brush to add some more hair detail back in. And to finish, we'll make sure that everything is blurred properly on our mask. Okay, now we have our action plan. In the next video, we can begin to edit this by making a Pen Path selection. 49. Pen Path Selection - Tricky Hair Project: Let's make our Pen Path selection. To begin, let's grab the Pen tool, and let's change the settings to Smart Mode and rubber band mode. So go ahead and begin laying down points, cutting into the hair a little bit. We want to make sure that the background is completely removed. The background is very similar in color to the hair. So if you're not sure if the background is showing, in this case, it's not a huge deal, but try your best to just include the hair in this selection. Okay, with that done, I'll just close my Pen Path and turn this into a selection. And now I'll just add a mask and I'll deselect with Command or Control D. Now I'm just going to add a new fill layer. And I'll place this underneath everything. So now that we've finished our selection in the next video, we'll clean up the edges of our mask. 50. Using Hair Brushes - Tricky Hair Project: This video, we'll use our custom brushes to clean up the edges of our mask. To get started, let's select the paint brush. And then we can select the mask. I'll press D for default colors, and we'll want to make sure we're painting in white paint on the mask. Then we can go to the brushes panel, and we can go to the custom hair brushes category so that we can begin with a multi strand wide brush. Then I'll just zoom in here. I'll make my brush a bit larger to make sure that this looks good for the size of hairs that we see here. Once you have the size right, we can go ahead and paint these wide hairs all along the edges of the entire hair. So I'm just going to do this, making sure I'm painting in the same direction that the hair is going, making sure the hair is always connected to our subject. And remember, if you ever mess up, you can just press Command or Control Z to undo whatever you've painted. I just finished painting with a wide brush, and I just wanted to show you something that I did as I was painting. You see how this hair looks like it's going off into nowhere? I made sure to paint strands of hair to connect those hairs to the other hairs. Anywhere where the hair looks like it's being cut off at a point, I made sure to loop it back into the hair. So, for example, the hairs here look like they're going off in this direction. And with the original mask, it just cut off right there. So I made sure to make loops of hair so that this made sense. So these hairs are connected to something. They don't just disappear. And I made sure to do that all the way around. So these hairs kind of cut off at a point. So I made sure that hairs were picking back up right there as I added hairs in there. So everywhere all along the edges, I'm just making sure the hairs make sense. They're looped together the way they would be. Everything is connected nicely. Nothing looks like it's just cut off and disappearing. So now that those edges look really good, I'm going to switch to our multi strand narrow brush. I'll make sure this is a good size. That looks pretty good. And now I'm just going to go through and add some more density to some areas. With that finished, I'm just going to switch to our single strand brush so that I can add some flyaway hairs throughout the hair. As I added these single strand hairs, I made sure to add more ends, more cut off hairs at the bottom of the hair because that's where hair would naturally be a little bit shorter. And then as I got closer to the top, I made more closed loops of hair. So these hairs are more just sticking out like that. There are some ends, but I made sure to include a little bit less of those and more loops of hair like that. So hairs that venture out and then come back in. And I think this looks pretty nice. Now, normally at this point, we would add a new pixel layer set as a child layer to our subject's layer. Then we would paint on these hairs so that they don't have the same color as the background. But in this case, the background is the same color as the hair, so I don't think we need to do that this time. I think the hair already is the right color, so we can skip that step. As a little bonus, I thought it would be fun to use one of our hair stamps to add a few more flyaway hairs to the back of her hair. To use the hair stamps, let's go up to our brush categories and then go down to our stamp hair brushes. Our model has long wavy hair, so I'm going to scroll down until I see the long waves stamp. This is actually the stamp that we made earlier in the course. I'll just make this larger, and you can see this will look really nice for our model. But we do need to choose a different color. Using the color panel, I'm going to use the color picker to sample her hair color. I'm going to add a new pixel layer underneath our model, so I can paint this underneath our model. So I'll just click to stamp that in place. Then I'll select the mesh Warp tool. I'm just going to move this so that the end is tucked in nicely over here. We don't want that sticking out. And then we can go ahead and pull out different areas to add more flyaway hairs. I like the flyaway hairs at the part line right here. So I'll just make sure this lines up with the part line that our model has There we go. I think that looks pretty nice. I'll just press Apply. And now you can see the before and after of adding those flyaway hairs in. And at the top, here is the before and after. I'm glad we did this because this looks a lot more natural to me. And these hairs also look really nice. I think the hair looks really nice right now. So with all of that done, in the next video, we're going to finish this project by adding a blur. 51. Blur the Mask - Tricky Hair Project: In this video, we'll add a blur. Let's go ahead and start by adding a blur to the edges of our mask. I'll zoom in so that we can see all of the painting that we did, and then I'll go to our filters and I'll apply the Gaussian blur filter. I'll set this as a child layer to our mask and then I'll increase the radius. I think that amount of blur looks pretty good. The hair looks softer, but you can still see it. All right. I think that looks really nice. We just added a blur to the edges of our mask, but we can also blur the hair stamp. Now, I actually think the hair staamp looks blurred enough as it is. But if it looked very sharp and in focus, I would just add another Gaussian blur to this layer. Well, that was an easy video. With that, we're officially done with our final project. Here is the complete before and after. Great job on this project. But 52. Class Conclusion: Congratulations. You finished the course. I know that was a lot to learn, but you're now a selections master. Thanks so much for watching, and I'll see you in the next Affinity Revolution Tutorial.