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The whole thing with "good enough" depends on what
you're putting the cutout on. One of the
easiest ways to find out "when" an extraction is good enough is to
view it on the background it'll be on when finished. Once a rough selection is made with the Quick
Selection Tool (W) you'd go directly to the Refine Edge dialog box. You can read about memorizing the shortcuts
the different modes the dialog box gives.
B for black, W for white, etc., but the easiest thing to remember is the
F key. It'll cycle you through each to
the possible overlays. One of the
overlays is "on Layers". If
you don't have anything under the Layer you do the extraction from, you'll have
a blank checkerboard pattern. If you've
copied the Layer (CTRL J) so as not to disturb the original you won't see any
change. If you put what will become the
background Layer under the extraction Layer you be able to see what the cutout
will look like on its intended target.
This is where the "good enough" cutout becomes important. Just for jiggles I put the guy from today's
image on a sky background. His chin hair
was good throughout. If I positioned the
wisps of hair at the back of his head on a part of the sky that was blue... no
problem. On an area that had grayer
clouds, no problem. When I moved it over
part of a particularly bright part of the cloud it was a mess. The fringing around each hair could be
quickly seen. In that spot it wasn't
good enough.
I could have gone in and played with the selection on a
pixel level to get that perfect cutout, but the plan was to use the fellow on
the background you see above. It wasn't
necessary to do any more than was already done.
The cutout was "good enough".
Try not to beat yourself up with work that doesn't
matter. Today's image wasn't going to
get any better by my fiddling around trying to get the perfect cutout. Some work just isn't worth the time you'd
have to put into it.
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