Why does Select > Modify > Border feather?

[Clonkex]

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.

[Chuck Uebele]

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.

[jane-e]

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

1. Make Selection
2. Modify Selection to number of pixels
3. Select and Mask > Set Contrast to 100%
   
4. Fill with Color

[Clonkex]

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.

[Jeff Arola]

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

[Clonkex]

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]

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.

[Bojan Živković]

If your end goal is to fill selection with color then you can try Edit > Stroke command.

[Clonkex]

No, I need to copy the selection and apply some filters among other things.

[Bojan Živković]

Ok, it was my try. If nothing else you can stroke selection on separate layer then to create selection from transparency. You have one more solution.

[Clonkex]

If you mean using the magic wand tool to select the stroke, that will result in an un-antialiased selection and doesn't look good. If you mean something else, please elaborate.

[Bojan Živković]

Here are the steps:

• Create selection
• Create blank new layer
• Edit > Stroke
• Ctrl/Cmd + D to deselect (you can skip this step)
• Ctrl/Cmd + click on layer thumbnail (with stroke) to create selection from transparency
• Delete layer with stroke if you do not need it

This can be useful sometimes, especially if you record action so you do not need to waste time clicking beside to change stroke width, position and color if you need to.

[Clonkex]

Wow, I never knew you could ctrl+click on a layer thumbnail to select from transparency (talk about an obscure feature!). That's the best solution so far. It uses stroke instead of border so it results in an almost perfectly-consistent width and it selects from transparency so it's a clean selection with exactly the right amount of anti-aliasing.

It's still a bit fiddly but at least it works very well as a workaround. Thanks!

[John5D80]

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]

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

[Jeff Arola]

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

[c.pfaffenbichler]

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

By @John5D80

Might you be confusing pixel based image editing with vector image editing? 

What is the actual situation and the result you want to achieve? 

[John5D80]

No. I'm claiming that the design itself is bad -- it essentially does the exact opposite of that the most sensable, intutive behavior the vast majority of people would expect it to be, and for seeminly no reason whatsoever. I wouldn't be so pissed if photoshop wasn't so stupidly expensive -- gimp and krita really is not that much worse, especially with weird quirks like this in photoshop

[c.pfaffenbichler]

What is the actual problem? 

Could you please post screenshots taken at View > 100% with the pertinent Panels (Toolbar, Layers, Options Bar, …) visible to illustrate?