PS 2015.5 - Refine Edge tool? Missing?

FOUND IT!  They won't remove it... They just can't...  Its there under the select menu!!!

The new tool is total garbage. I had 5 minutes to do a quick extraction of curly hair from a background. I spent 10 times that watching videos to try and learn the new tool. It's horrible.

I can't believe after 20 years Adobe still hasn't figured out how to make a tool that extracts hair. I'd call "Select and Mask" an experiment, a hardly-working beta, not a production tool.

Installing a whole other version of Photoshop just to use an old (and way more useful) tool is also garbage. Can't we just have both? AND the "Extract" tool just for fun?!?

Thanks.

You know Photoshop is becoming a constant learning challenge. For someone who uses it for work I don't have time to keep learning all these new changes it sucks! Refine edge was perfect you should have just added a different mode but kept the refine edge it was so simple and worked wonderfully. Sometimes Less is more..ADOBE

I also can't find out how to use this tool. I need to select the edges of hair, and used toe brush tool once I was inside the Refine Edge dialog box. That allowed me to use the brush tool around the edges of hair, and select loose strands. Now, the tool selects larges swatches of color that is touched by the brush, and does not select the strands. So I'm left with a person's head and a 3-inch blobs of red background on either side of the head, because it acts like the magic wand tool instead. How do I make a quick selection with the lasso tool, then refine the edge and select hair? Doesn't make sense to make a pen tool selection each and every time you want to select hair - I make a selection of the person's entire body, and use just part of it to refine the edge. Totally lost on how to simply select strands of hair.

I emailed Joel Baer at Adobe several cases of new S&M being failure compared with old Refine edge, with examples, as he asked to do so somewhere above.

He never replied me.

I can repost all of them here, but I think everybody here and elsewhere have tons of these examples.

_Chilexy's example is even more detailed as mine, Conrad's C example is ridiculously weak.

I repeat once more: S&M is failure, soft launch is crucial, feedback is must-be.

Nobody cancelled horses when automobiles were invented.

Bring back RE and stop spoiling working features.

P.S. Is there a way to get SELECT AND MASK to "remember" the settings I choose (like the View Mode) so I don't have to keep changing it every single time I go into the tool?

Glad to see I'm not the only one who scratched my head after updating to the latest PS.

The only update Adobe ever made that completely destroyed my workflow was back when they changed AUTO-BLEND LAYER, which I used in my digital paintings. The change made ABL useless for my needs, adding hours to each painting. Worse was that the last version that had the original "algorithm" wasn't available through CC and when I finally found it on some (potentially sketchy) site, the function still defaulted to the newer process due to how everything was installed anyway.

That was a nightmare, so when I loaded up the latest PS and didn't see REFINE MASK, which I use in all of my work, I panicked because my first thought was, "They did it again...". I tried SELECT AND MASK figuring it must be the replacement and I haven't been able to get the same results I used to get with REFINE MASK. Not by a long shot.

I watched the videos and workflow examples posted here and they're great, but it doesn't matter that with a few extra steps and tweaks, I can get kinda sorta closeish to what I used to be able to do on the fly with REFINE MASK and REFINE EDGE. Something that used to give me what I wanted in one move now being something I have to fuss with means more time spent and more time spent is bad. When you have as many projects as I do, it adds up.

I don't think it needs to be removed and I'm not furious like I was with the change in ABL. It's just inconvenient when something went backwards in its usefulness to me even if it supposedly expanded its functionality for everyone. I also prefer not to keep different versions on my machine, so I guess I'm in the same boat as the rest who now have to do their clean up manually.

IN THE MEANTIME. For all CC users, I just found out there is a way to keep both versions of cc 2014/2015 and 2015.5. It will probably require to revert to the 2014/2015 by looking for previous versions in the Cloud menu, and then updating again to 2015.5 (June update) but using the advanced options. See link for instructions. I will try this. I remember the refine edge was in that version. I have not tried it yet, since I need to contact my company's IT to do it (permissions.) So, hopefully it works as a temporary solution. I know it means two versions of the same program, but I'd rather do that than spend too much time on the same task and still not present a good quality work. Crossing fingers for it to work!

Install a previous version of any Creative Cloud application

I understand the tool was improved in some way, but, for tasks like mine, where I need hand control over what gets refined, please let me know when a fix for this will be available. I work mostly with pet hairs, most of the times, the isolated stock images are in a white background, therefore the need to have more "manual" control over the edges is essential for my jobs. These images go into all kinds of dark, clear or light backgrounds and it really produces an unacceptable quality of work. Please see samples.

Acting proactively, in my case, I can still use some handy-dandy hair and fur brushes, as the final result shows, but that translates into more manual work, that is not really following the original edge, but more guided toward hand painting if you will. It becomes a more lengthy and difficult task than it should and it still does not produce the same results. Please, please! add a feature that allows more control.

I do not like this new tool then how to return to the old version?