Refine Edge has Returned

Hi everyone,

I learned from one of our contributors here  in the forum (cyberwasp ) over the weekend that the Refine Edge/Mask function is in fact still available for use in Photoshop CC2015.5.1. As the information is embedded deep inside a long pre-existing thread, I thought it would be useful to repost the information here. This appears to be a somewhat undocumented feature now and I don't know what tweaks Adobe have made-if any, but it does work and may possibly help people who are experiencing severe disruption to their workflow. A small caveat, there was a Photoshop update posted at the weekend and I tried the following after installing the update and so don't know for sure if it came with the update or not. 

To use Refine Edge all you need to do is have a selection. To use Refine Mask you need a layer with a layer mask-it will not work if there is no mask or if the image not the mask is selected.

To activate the old dialog, Go to the Select and Mask option in the menu bar. Hold down the shift key and click on Select and Mask. You will find the Refine Edge/Mask panel pops up instead of the Select and Mask workspace.

Below I have just used a mask rather than a selection, but a selection works as well. Cyberwasp thinks that the tool may not be as good as before , but its really difficult to tell from the few experiments I have done. What it does do is give access to better control of the 'Decontaminate color' slider

I don't have too many issues with Select and Mask myself as the machines I have access too use Nvidia cards, but those of you experiencing problems with AMD card crashes may like to give this a try.

Terri