Basic photoshop

looksee

Help, this is so basic I feel stupid asking.

I am trying to cut an image out from a plain background. I have used the polygonal tool and outlined it and I want to cut it out with no feather. but every time I do it it has a great soft edge on it. It says 0% feather and I cannot see that I have anything else set, everything in 'refine edge' is set at 0. Any suggestions?

Its now a couple of years since I used photoshop and it all seems to have vanished from my head...

allfred

I don't have PS installed so I can't try but if by any chance you've got GIMP then I can give you step by step guides.

For GIMP you can use the "Free Select Tool"

I'm sure there are other ppl out there that have PS handy.

5uspect

Press Q to better quick mask mode and see how your selection looks. It shouldn't be feathered unless there's an option enabled in the tool dashboard.

Dramatik

I think you'll have to re-select it, you have to set the feather amount first before you select it for it to take effect. It doesn't work if you have something selected first and then try to change the feather amount.

InTheTrees

And remember to put it on its own layer.

disj

hmmm ensure that when you have the polygon lasso tool selected that all the pre-sets on the toolbar are as you want, eg select the polygon tool and set feather to 0. When you have your item selected with those settings correct it should be fine as the refine edge settings will not apply unless you select them to. But as another poster said ensure you have those settings set up before you actually select the object just to be sure.

looksee

Yes, it really was as simple as I had feather set before I started, then subsequently changed it, but I needed to re-set it. I figured it out, thank you for your help. It amazing how quickly you forget (well I do anyway :eek:) - yesterday I struggled for ages wondering why pics imported into Quark were coming up too big. Then I remembered I had to use tiffs and not jpgs....