1. Inspect the complete result
Begin zoomed out. Check whether the cutout contains the right subject, all essential body parts or object components, and no large background islands. If the basic silhouette is wrong, fix that before hair, fur, or narrow gaps.
2. Restore large missing regions
Select Restore and use a relatively large brush for missing shoulders, clothing, product surfaces, ears, or paws. Keep strokes inside the area that clearly belongs to the subject. Undo immediately if a stroke brings back too much background.
3. Erase obvious background
Switch to Erase and remove large unwanted areas, including ground patches and openings inside a subject’s silhouette. Work from empty space toward the edge; this makes an overshoot less likely.
4. Zoom only as far as the image supports
Increase magnification and reduce brush size for small corrections. Do not chase individual pixels in a soft or compressed source photo. The image may not contain a perfectly sharp boundary, and manufacturing one can create a brittle edge.
5. Check different backgrounds
A pale halo hides on white and jumps out on black. A dark fringe does the opposite. Preview against at least one light and one dark background, correct the worst fringe, then return to the intended final background.
Common edge problems
- Halo: erase slightly inward along the contaminated edge.
- Chopped detail: restore from the solid interior toward the missing feature.
- Filled gap: use a small Erase stroke through spaces between arms, legs, handles, or furniture parts.
- Jagged contour: judge at final display size before smoothing; the preview may exaggerate the issue.
Know when to choose another photo
If motion blur, extreme backlight, or similar foreground and background colors erase the visual boundary, manual painting cannot recover detail that was never captured. A neighboring frame can produce a better result in seconds.