selection brush becomes invisible again certain colors

Forum|Forum|6 years ago
July 26, 2019
5 replies
1547 views

I use the selection brush as a deletion tool. On certain backgrounds i am working with and with very small brush settings the tool becomes almost invisible. Is there a way to change the color of the brush to make it more visible ?

thanks

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Greg_S.

Community Expert

I'm not sure I fully understand what you are asking for. In your screenshot, I have no problem distinguishing the cursor, even though I have a cataract.

The cursor does in fact change from light to dark depending on the color intensity/saturation of the pixel(s) under the cross-hair. Your sample photo contains many different colors and RGB values of pixels touching each other. So, I'm not sure how you would expect a change in cursor color to work.

Perhaps changing the size of the brush would aid your selection process. I use the bracket keys to do this quickly and I also use the Alt key to switch between add and subtract. There are also several different views of the selection if you go into the Refine Edge dialog.

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Rod597

Known Participant

Ah, then my apologies for thinking I was in the Formal Adobe area for customer suggestions. I was directed to this web page by an Adobe agent, who has perhaps preferred to pass on an awkward question. Please do understand, my annoyance is reserved for Adobe, not the community. I guess the best we may hope for is that Adobe do investigate this trail and get back to us with some positive solution.

It has been a real pain in the posterior over the past several years and thousands of images from the archaeological community, that I then work with. A seemingly simple solution would save hours of processing time.

In the meantime, my thanks to you and the community for looking at the situation.

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Rod597

Known Participant

If I may add to the Selection Brush conundrum (Elements 2022) – I do a great deal of imagery work with the Portable Antiquities Scheme, and more than often, the object photographs I deal with are tricky to work with. In brief, when the Select Subject can’t define the object edges due to their blending into the background, I must resort the Selection Brush to resolve the edges. The brush seems to change from a black edge to a pale grey from time to time, BUT, often, the brush disappears by merging into the background of the image. See below: -

As can been seen above, I have let a small section of the brush visible over the rim of the coin. If we had control of the colour/boldness of that brush, we could then 'tune' it to meet with the situation. What can be done?

Glenn 8675309

Legend

That's not a very high quality image in dealing with selecting edges.

You can alway refine the edige of your selection. SELECT >REFINE EDGE.

Given the jagged edge of the coin (or whatever it is) selecting the edge, to select the basckground is probably gooing to end up with the jagged edges seen in your post. Smoothing and feathering the selection can be your friend.

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Rod597

Known Participant

Thank you for your notes, to be clear, the image I sent was taken on a phone camera of a very enlarged section of the coin rim. The intension being to illustrate how the Selection Brush disappears into the background colour/shading. I am very familiar with the Refine function and I do use it, but sparingly as the object must be true to the original coin (in this case).

The Magic Wand function is useless given the images I am sent to deal with. Their backgrounds are often far from ideal, and the after a great deal of experiment, the Select Subject within the Quick Selection tool works the best. However, if you examine the image below, which is a cut for the full-size image, you will see that the system can’t capture the edge when it blends tone/colour wise into the background. That noted, the Select Subject tool is excellent at selecting an object, properly photographed with an appropriate background colour.

It is the next stage, when I must use the Selection Brush to grab those missing areas of the object. That is when the circle of the brush tool will simply blend into the background of the object becoming invisible. That then making the efficient selection of the rouge edges very difficult. Hence my request to give control of the colour of that Selection Brush tool circle, so that I may always be able to keep it in view.

Can you make the Selection Brush marker, adjustable in colour/intensity?