P: Is there an optimal setting for Select and Mask? I can never get it to work efficiently :-(

Hi Jerry,

Looking again at what you are doing - have you tried Select Subject ? - I am not sure when it came in to CC, but it is in CC19.1.

You just open your image and then click Select Subject under the Select menu - it will automatically find all the edges and select the image subject and then you just need to use Select and Mask to refine things. It works pretty well and a lot of the edge refinement seems to be done by it. On my slower Mac, a MacBook Pro, using a similar image of a girl on a relatively simple background, it takes about 3 seconds to find the subject and do the selection. You might want to give it a try.

Hi Jerry,
did you ever try "Onionskin mode"? In the past this was faster than the other modes.
If you want to try to reset the prefs, you could just remove the prefs file from its directory (and save it for later use) and start PS. Then it builds a new prefs file anyway. In case that it doesn ́t help, you could use the old prefs again.
I addition you could save all your shortcuts etc.and reload them later.

Hey Stefan. So I thought, let me try. I tried with OpenCL on/ off, GPU off/on(basic, normal, advanced) and it's still the same. I also experimented with the different cache settings, too. As a last resort, I would reinstall with clean preferences and see if that does anything. Just have to reapply all my shortcuts etc. after I guess. 

Jerry,

does it make any difference, if you switch OpenCL off or if you maybe switch GPU acceleration totally off? DId you try the 3 different GPU seeings (basic, advanced etc.)?
Did you try different cache settings?

Hi Joel, thanks for getting in touch. It does seem a bit machine specific indeed. All my drivers are up to date, including the nvidia driver. Is there anything else I can try?

Thank you Paddy, great tips here. I will give your tips a go. You are right though - all in all, the tool does need a coat of looking at! Let's see how it goes

Hi Jerry- sorry to hear about this! This sounds like something that might be machine specific, since it appears that your lower powered machines are handling the same image with better performance. 

One more thing to check- it could be that your GPU or driver is having some sort of issue. Can you verify that your drivers are all up to date?

Try using the refine tool in single strokes just on on the actual edges that you want to refine. From the video, it looks as though you are dragging it over a large area of her hair and then making lots of drags on an area you want to capture fly-aways in. Each stroke of the tool appears to make photoshop try to reevaluate the edges in the area you have stroked over, so one can end up queuing lots of edge detection if you shake the mouse around a lot.

For hair fly-aways, I tend to find using a 0 contrast with a brush that is a little wider than the flyaway is most efficient. Once they are all selected I may narrow the brush and bump the contrast up to refine individual fly-aways.

It seems pretty sensitive to brush size and the number of strokes you use, performance-wise and I have had to change my technique from the old Refine Selection, where I did more as you seem to do in the video.

There does seem to be a bit of a performance issue overall though, particularly with complex edges or large images. I also get the spinning wheel then from time to time,even on a single stroke over a complex or low-contrasting area. (I get it on two different Macs, both of which are well-spec'd).

I've tried using Affinity on the same image for comparison, but although it is faster, it doesn't seem to be as good as Photoshop in terms of precision for edge refinement.

All in all though, I think the tool needs a coat of looking at from Adobe - it is slower, sometimes to the point of being not really fit for purpose.

That's the version I'm running, 19.1. I also use a low performance machine at times with no issues. 

The only thing really is a bit of contrast for when I'm doing refine edge(as her hair clashes with the background a bit) and a tiny bit of feathering. I tested it with everything zeroed out(after the second recording I just made) and it's marginally quicker but as I bump the contrast for to do refine edge, I get that spinning ball again.