Known Participant

Question

Why does Select > Modify > Border feather?

Forum|Forum|7 years ago
November 1, 2018
4 replies
9750 views

I'm honestly very confused at this point, and more than a little frustrated. I come from a Gimp background, and having just finished painstakingly creating a complex selection of part of an image, I expect to be able to border that selection easily. Sure enough I find the Border option in Select > Modify > Border, but upon applying that option I find that it also feathers. Wtf? Why would it do two operations in one? Surely that severely limits its usefulness.

Now I'm stuck. I have a complex selection and I just need to border it. THIS SHOULD BE SO EASY. I'm pretty frustrated that something that should be so incredibly simple is requiring me to make a forum post. I actually can't even begin to imagine what the developers were thinking when they decided to add a feather to the border with no option to turn it off.

selection border

A

Anonymous

I know this is 6 years later, but the way this is designed is total bs and they really ought to not have designed it this way

Jeff Arola

Community Expert

John5D80,

Actually that is by design and how Select>Border is supposed to work.

See here under Create a selection around a selection border

Adjust pixel selections in Photoshop

D

Don5CF3

Participant

TBF, he literally said "the way it is designed."

BTW, I agree it's total BS. That's how I got here. Why [removed by mod] would I want to feather a border by default?

FYI, I use a lot of abbreviations.

Jeff Arola

Community Expert

Actually that is by design and how Select>Border is supposed to work.

See here under Create a selection around a selection border

Adjust pixel selections in Photoshop

ClonkexAuthor

Known Participant

Well yeah I guessed that much, but it's a useless design. It seems to me the times where it's actually useful to do that would be incredibly rare, and if it created a border without feathering you could simply feather after creating the border and have waaaay more flexibility and control.

But I'm not even asking for border to not feather by default. I'm sure there's people that use that feature and would be upset if it changed. I'm just asking for a way to border the selection without a feather. It could be as simple as a slider in the border dialogue that controls the percentage of feather.

Jeff Arola

Community Expert

Gimp gives the same result if one selects Feathered in the Select>Border dialog, but gimp does give two other choices of Soft and Hard which would be nice in photoshop as well.

In photoshop after going to Select>Border you could use Select>Edit in Quick Mask Mode then Image Adjustments>Levels

and move the Highlights slider all the way left for a completely feather free (Hard) selection. Then go to Select and click on Edit in Quick Mask Mode to exit Quick Mask.

jane-e

Community Expert

According to my notes, Photoshop has been doing this since CS3. Try this:

Make Selection
Modify Selection to number of pixels
Select and Mask > Set Contrast to 100%
Fill with Color

ClonkexAuthor

Known Participant

Wow, I didn't even know Select and Mask was a thing. I can't yet figure out what clicking on the image is actually doing but I'll google that and learn about it properly. For now I can see that 100% contract and about 20 smoothing does a pretty good job of removing the feather, but unfortunately depending on the angle of the original selection it sometimes ends up with a thinner "stroke" (I'm filling my selection to test the results, but I won't be stroking once I am able to get the selection I need). I'll continue playing and see if I can figure out a better solution.

Adobe, I still want a better border tool. It's is ridiculous that I have to go to these lengths.

Chuck Uebele

Community Expert

That is odd. never noticed that, but then I don't use that feature. I suppose you could save your selection as an alpha channel then use selection expand and contract, but I'm with you that border shouldn't add a feather.

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