Select and Mask Refine Hair

[tomato_lou]

I am having trouble with refining hair in a mask. I have updated photoshop, and tried to replicate various tutorials. The brush and refine edge tools do nothing to the selection. I cannot add anything or remove anything from a very basic selection, regardless of what view I use or what settings I use.
If I increase the radius of a brush in the refine mask area, the setting always goes back to radius 0.
Is this a glitch or have I got a setting wrong somewhere?

[Barbara Ash]

Please post the image in question.

[tomato_lou]

Here is is. No changes happen to the selection if I use the brushes, but If I export the mask to a new layer, the edits are there in very crude form. Refine hair does nothing though.

[Trevor.Dennis]

Can you repost the image without the marching ants, and at a decent resolution?  It's difficult to assess the image with the selection showing.  It should work OK though.  Even a simple thing like resetting Preferences can get things working again.  I have definitely had exactly that experience with Select & Mask.

[ni24666203x70k]

Select and mask has been flawed for several years. Manually adjust the functions associated with the selection. Alternatively, you can use the old Refine Edge by holding down the shift and pressing select and mask. Then you can get accurate and fast results as you see them.

[tomato_lou]

Thanks for the response. I am probably not wording my issue very well. As soon as I am in the select and mask window, I cannot see my selection change. There are either no marching ants, or they don't change at all. See these two attached images. One should be showing my marching ants selection, but there is nothing there. When I hit enter, it does add a selection to a new masked layer, but it's basically a guessing game because I cannot see anything happening as I try to work on it. Does that make sense? Im wondering if maybe I have something in my photoshop preferences that is messing it up? It's very annoying because my work requires a fair bit of hair masking and I cannot find a workaround.

[Barbara Ash]

I think you can get a better result. These are the steps I did:

First roughly dragged the Object Selection tool around the dog to get a rough selection.

Then chose Select and Mask.

Using the Refine Edge Brush, I dragged over the edges, dragging over a small piece of the edge a little at a time, with the brush size about half inside and half outside the edge. All settings were at defaults (zero), except for putting a checkmark on Decntaminate Colors. This is the result.

And this is the result on a black background to see it better.