Web Courses Academy Blog

Mask Edge – How to Get Out of a Hairy Situation

Author: WC.Bear
Hello everybody, I am here at WCB to motivate our team and highlight each member skills! Welcome to WCB, I will be waiting for you to work and talk about our passion: Web Design !
photoshop masked edge tool
Quick jump to topics
Sharing is caring

Hair is no easy business; it is never the easiest thing to deal with when you are trying to extract it from another image with a background. No matter how meticulous you are with the selection tool, you will most likely get a result that looks like a magazine cutout. Introducing the Photoshop mask edge tool.

Using the Photoshop Mask Edge Tool

Hair is no easy business; it is never the easiest thing to deal with when you are trying to extract it from another image with a background. No matter how meticulous you are with the selection tool, you will most likely get a result that looks like a magazine cutout.

Luckily, Adobe has introduced us to “Mask Edge” tool after CS5 and our hairy situation is history. With the Photoshop mask edge tool, whether it’s weave, straight, dreadlocks, curly, wavy, red, blond, brown, brunette, or any other style, we’ve got them under control. So what do you say? Shall we let the cutting begin?

1. Open up the image that you want to cut out from the background. Heba has been a good sport and let me uses her as a model for this Photoshop mask edge tool tutorial.

photoshop mask edge tool

2. Next, pick the “Quick Selection Tool” locating on your PSD tool bar. If you can’t see it, look for a “Magic Wand Tool”. Click and hold down your mouse on the “Magic Wand” icon to open up a hidden sub menu, and you should see the “Quick Selection Tool” hiding in there.

photoshop mask edge tool

3. Once the Photoshop mask edge tool is picked, you can now use it to select part of the image that you want to extract. The goal here is to try and capture as much of the image as possible without getting too much of the grey color in the background.

Tips: While making selection, you can hold down “Shift” to add parts of the image to the selection, or hold down “Alt” to remove unnecessary parts.

photoshop mask edge tool

4. Once you are happy with the selection, click on the “Add Layer Mask” button locating at the bottom of a “Layer” panel (if you can’t see it, press “F7” or go to Window >> Layers.) A thumbnail for the layer mask will appear next to your image and the background should now been removed, but it’s also make Heba looks like she’s having a bad hair day. Don’t worry we’ll fix this!

photoshop mask edge tool

5. Click on the thumbnail of your layer mask then go to Window >> Properties. Once you see the “Propeties” panel look for a “Mask Edge…” button.

photoshop mask edge tool

6. A “Refine Mask” panel should appear. To use the Photoshop Mask Edge tool, click on the brush icon inside the “Refine Mask” panel. Now comes the fun part. With the “Mask Edge” tool selected, start painting back part of the hair that was cropped out by the mask when we make our first selection. No need to be too neat on this.

photoshop mask edge tool

8. Once you released your mouse, viola! The tool automatically removes the grey areas and Heba now got her fabulous locks back. Before clicking “Ok” make sure to select “New Layer with Layer Mask” on the “Output” area. This makes sure that you have a backup layer that you can access whenever you want.

photoshop mask edge tool

9. You will notice that there are now two layers on the “Layers” panel, which are your back-up layer and its copy. Your back-up layer will automatically get hidden by Photoshop and you can now continue your editing on the copied layer.

photoshop mask edge tool

10. With the copied layer selected, Press Ctrl (Cmd) + J. This is a shortcut that allows you to quickly duplicate layers. With layers stack on top of each other, you will see that more details of the hair is being picked up by the program and thus adding more volume to it.

photoshop mask edge tool

11. After you are happy with the result. Merge all the layers together by holding shift and clicked on all the duplicated layers. Right click and you should see an option to “Merge Layers”

12. Now you can use the beautiful cut-out for any of your project!

photoshop mask edge tool

And that’s it! With this Photoshop mask edge tool you can now chop, crop, and slice any monster hairdo that gets in your way.

If you enjoy this Photoshop mask edge tool tutorial, please don’t forget to check out our blog and follow us on Facebook for more useful content similar to this one.

Lastly, we also offer Photoshop course here at Web Courses Bangkok, so please give us a call or send us an email when you are ready to take your Photoshop skill to the next level. Until then, enjoy cutting.

More great articles
There is more where this came from
Join our monthly newsletter packed with course dates, latest articles, free resources and job opportunities

Sorry. You must be logged in to view this form.

Promise to only send you useful interesting newsletters once a month.