Cutouts

Stop Fighting the Pen Tool: A Smarter Way to Cut Out Planes, Cars, and Anything With Hard Edges
Video Tutorials

Stop Fighting the Pen Tool: A Smarter Way to Cut Out Planes, Cars, and Anything With Hard Edges

There’s a specific kind of frustration that comes from spending forty-five minutes on a selection, zooming out, and realizing the edges look like you traced the thing with a bar of soap. Quick Select is great. Magic Wand has its moments. But when you’re cutting out something with hard, defined edges, like a car, a plane, a pair of glasses, a product shot, the fuzzy selection tools will consistently let you down.

Stop Fighting With Hair Selections — Here's the Photoshop Trick That Actually Works
Video Tutorials

Stop Fighting With Hair Selections — Here's the Photoshop Trick That Actually Works

There’s a specific kind of frustration that comes from spending an hour manually tracing flyaway hair with the Lasso tool, zoomed in at 400%, one pixel at a time, only to zoom back out and realize it still looks like your subject is wearing a helmet made of jagged edges. I’ve been there more times than I want to admit. Early in my freelance days I’d deliver composites where the hair looked painted on, and I’d just… hope the client didn’t notice.