Martin Evening has posted a great intro to using Photoshop CS3’s new Quick Selection tool together with the new Refine Edge* dialog. He demonstrates using the tools together with a gradient map adjustment layer (a venerable tool that might get some "I-did-not-know-that"’s on its own) to replace the background in a photo. Additional details, plus his downloadable PDF overview of Photoshop CS3 and Bridge, are on PhotoshopNews.com. [Via]
* What Martin quite modestly doesn’t mention is that it’s because of his urging–and engineer Jeff Chien’s late-stage efforts–that Refine Edge works not only on selections, but on channels & layer masks as well. Seeing this demo makes me glad he talked us into it.
Nice demo, and thanks to Martin for insisting on layer mask functionality. I did not know this was possible before Martins demo – although I had tried Refine Edge on a layer mask before with no success. – The difference was that the selection must be active when invoking Refine Edge. One little correction, if I may; Martin is using a Gradient adjustment layer – not a Gradient Map adjustment layer.
[Hmm–it’s called Gradient Map in my copy of CS3. In any case, it’s a powerful tool that may be unfamiliar to a fair number of people. –J.]
Gradient Map is different than the gradient layer shown in the video.
Gradient Map takes the brightness of each pixel and remaps it to a color in the Gradient ramp. It’s how I achieved most of the tinting on my homepage image:
[Damn–this is why I need to stop blogging at 2am (well, among other reasons). I stand corrected. –J.]