Uploaded September 2020 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

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In this tutorial, you will learn How to Make Smooth Cut Outs in Photoshop.

We have all been in a situation where after selecting a subject we end up having a rough edge or a black outline around it. To make it look super professional here is our approach. This may seem a little bit tedious but this is what will separate an expert from an amateur.

For this tutorial we’ve already separated the background and as you can see, our foreground does have a little black outline around the cut edge. We’ve used a mask for it, which will come in handy later on. To see more on using masks, please check our tutorial about masks.

Let’s start off by selecting the subject. Press CMD and click on the layer thumbnail. This will select the entire content of the layer. Next, we’ll go to Select - Modify - Contract. Set it to 2 pixels and click ok. 2 pixels always works.

Now, we could go with this selection, but the results are usually extremely sharp to a point where it looks unnatural. We want to have a very small bit of softness as part of that natural depth of field roll off.

Let’s go to Select - Modify - Feather and make it 1 pixel. Click ok. Let’s press CMD+SHIFT+I to invert our selection. Now if we zoom in, we can see the selection overlapping the black edge. You can click delete here, but this could mess with the hair for instance. Thus, what we need to do is manually delete these parts.

To do this, select the mask that we have and using a black brush, paint over the part that needs to be removed. You can press CMD+H which will hide the marquee lines and make it easier to see the results. What we do is go over the edge twice which does the job perfectly!

That’s it! A bit of manual work that’ll take your photo editing to another level!

❓💬 What’s your go to technique for subject selection? Please let us know in the comments.

#HowTech #Photoshop
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