How to Cut Out a Person in Photoshop: Easy Editing Guide (2026)

To cut out a person in Photoshop you make a selection of them, refine the edges inside Select and Mask, and turn that selection into a layer mask. The mask holds the cutout without deleting a single pixel, so the person can move onto any background later. On a clean, well-lit photo the whole job takes about ten minutes.

The part beginners underestimate is the edge, not the clicking. Hair, motion blur and background colour bleeding into skin are what separate a believable composite from a sticker. The advice that comes up most often on r/photoshop is blunt: never use the eraser tool, never delete, always work with a layer mask. Follow that rule and a cut-off sleeve or a background patch is always one slider away from fixed.

What You Need

Photoshop, one photo, and somewhere to test the result. Current Photoshop versions call the refinement workspace Select and Mask and you open it from Select > Select and Mask. Photoshop CS6 and earlier call the same dialog Refine Edge, so older tutorials are still usable if you map the names.

Work from the largest version of the photo you have. A raw file or a full-resolution JPEG gives the Refine Edge Brush pixels to work with, while a thumbnail from a social post gives it none, and that is why small images produce crunchy edges no slider can rescue.

Grab a second image to test over. Transparency hides problems rather than showing them, so a busy, mid-tone background is far more honest than the grey and white checkerboard. A graphics tablet is helpful rather than required, since the Refine Edge Brush rewards a steady hand and pressure control.

Before you start, open the file, rename the Background layer to something like Person Original, and save a working copy. Every step below stays reversible as long as you keep that layer and never flatten the file.

Step-by-Step

Here is the whole workflow in six lines, then each stage is broken down underneath.

1. Open your image in Photoshop and duplicate the background layer.
2. Run Select > Subject, or click Select Subject in the contextual task bar.
3. Add a layer mask so the selection becomes a cutout you can undo.
4. Open Select > Select and Mask and refine the edges with the Refine Edge Brush.
5. Clean up the mask with a black or white brush, then check the edge over a real background.
6. Export the result as a transparent PNG or place the person on a new background.

How to Cut Out a Person in Photoshop Using Select and Mask

Start with the right selection tool, because the later stages only clean up what the first one leaves behind.

For most portraits, Quick Selection beats Object Selection because you control exactly where it stops. Click once on the person’s shirt, then hold Shift and add the rest of the body. Hold Alt while clicking to subtract anything it wrongly grabs. If Select Subject is available in the task bar, run it first and then correct it with the Quick Selection Tool rather than starting over.

One note on the Object Selection Tool: its options bar has a Device and Cloud dropdown, and Cloud uses Adobe Sensei. Cloud usually finds more on busy backgrounds, but it needs a network connection, so offline work falls back to Device or to the Quick Selection Tool.

Deliberately select a little more than you need. Users on r/productphotography recommend over-selecting rather than cutting tight, because missing pixels are painful to add back while surplus ones disappear with a single click.

Now open Select > Select and Mask, or press Alt+Ctrl+R (Alt+Cmd+R on macOS). The window shows your cutout against a view mode, with the Refine Edge Brush on the right and the Global Refinements sliders underneath.

Set View Mode to On Black and set the radius in the Refine Edge Brush panel to roughly half the width of the hair you are about to paint, so the brush’s edge detection can see individual strands rather than a solid block. Short taps on the edge, not long strokes, because you can always add more passes.

Tick Smart Radius so the brush switches to a small radius on hard edges like a shoulder and a wide radius on hair. Then make your first pass over the whole outline, and a second pass over the soft parts.

These sliders apply to the entire selection, which is exactly why they destroy hair. Retouching Academy’s tutorial puts Feather near 2.5 percent and Contrast near 20 percent for portrait work, and those are reliable starting points because the Refine Edge Brush has already done the delicate work by then.

When the edge holds up on black and on white, choose Output To > New Layer with Layer Mask. A black and white thumbnail appears on the layer thumbnail beside the Add Layer Mask icon, a rectangle with a white circle inside it, and that thumbnail is the whole cutout. White reveals, black hides, grey is partial. Nothing has been erased, so Ctrl+Z puts the original back at any point.

Refine Hair, Fur, and Difficult Edges

Hair fails in one of two ways: it gets cut off flat, which people call helmet hair, or the background comes along with it and leaves a halo. The Refine Edge Brush solves both when you give it room to calculate.

1. Zoom to 200 or 400 percent and work along one section of hair at a time.
2. Set the brush radius to the width of the hair mass, then shorter strokes for the wisps at the outside.
3. Paint slowly along the edge with short dabs, letting the brush sample on both sides of the boundary.
4. Run several passes rather than one long stroke, checking On Black between passes.
5. Tick Decontaminate Colors to pull background colour out of the edge pixels, then Shift Edge to about minus 5 percent if a dark rim survives.

The Refine Hair button, near the top of the workspace in current versions, does the same calculation across the whole selection in one pass. It saves real time on a head-and-shoulders portrait, and it needs a loose initial selection to work with, so widen the selection slightly before you press it.

Motion blur and semi-transparent fabric need a different trick. Select those areas, and let the sliders handle them instead of the brush: raise Contrast a little and drop Shift Edge, since the brush cannot see a boundary that is not there. A white shirt photographed against a bright sky genuinely has no hard edge, and trying to invent one looks worse than a soft transition.

For fur, lashes and thin strands, the two-pass method from spsphoto’s Select and Mask tutorial is the most reliable route. Handle the soft edges such as hair, fur and fabric on one layer, handle hard edges such as arms, shoulders and glasses on a second masked layer, then stack them in a group controlled by its own group mask. A single mask can never be perfect for both edge types at once.

One last fringe fix belongs here rather than later. Retouching Academy recommends painting with a soft black brush on the mask thumbnail after setting the mask layer’s blend mode to Soft Light, which gently pulls back fringing without chewing into the detail beside it.

Place the Cutout on a New Background

With the mask done, placing the person is ordinary compositing. Copy the masked layer, open the new background, and paste it as a new layer above the background.

Hold Ctrl+T (Cmd+T on macOS) for Free Transform, tick Warp in the options bar for a perspective change, and set Scale and Proportion together. A person moved from a wide shot into a close-up looks wrong purely because of relative size, so match the head-to-frame ratio of the new background before you worry about colour.

Match the light next. Open the cutout layer and use a Hue and Saturation adjustment or a Curves adjustment layer clipped to the person, then push warmth or coolness until the skin tone sits in the same world as the background. Large soft brush on a low-opacity Dodge and Burn layer, set to Overlay, fixes shadows that fall in the wrong direction.

For stubborn colour mismatches, a Solid Color fill layer set to Color, clipped to the person, and sampled with the eyedropper from the background, shifts the whole cutout in one move. Check the result at 100 percent zoom with the layer toggled on and off, since edges that look fine at 50 percent are the ones people notice later.

Common Mistakes

Nearly every bad cutout is one of six problems, and each has a specific fix rather than a general instruction to redo the work.

Content-Aware Fill is not the answer to any of these. It fills a region with plausible pixels, which is useful for a patch of sky, not for separating one person from a background. If Select Subject seems to be finding nothing at all, the usual causes are a locked or flattened layer with no RGB channel, an image still in Camera Raw, or a connection problem when Cloud processing is selected.

Never flatten, never use the eraser, and never apply the mask by right-clicking it and choosing Apply Layer Mask. Each of those three is irreversible, and none of them is needed to finish the job.

Save and Export Your Finished Cutout

Save the working file as a PSD first. The layered version keeps the mask, so a mistake at the export stage costs you one click to undo rather than the whole edit. Keep the original photo in its own layer at the bottom of the stack for reference, and rename the cutout layer something meaningful if the file will hold several composites.

For a cutout with a transparent background, use File > Export > Export As, name the file with a .png extension, and save. PNG keeps the alpha channel, which is the transparency itself. In the export options a smaller number in the Quality field means a lossless file, so leave it at Maximum for cutout work.

For a cutout on a new background, a JPEG at Quality 7 to 9 is fine and much smaller. WebP is the sensible choice for web graphics, and Save for Web is still there in current versions under File > Export if you need a rough size estimate before committing.

If you are cutting out fifty or a hundred images for a client, the workflow above is the repeatable part: name the layers the same way every time, keep your brush radius and Feather values as saved workspace or action presets, and review each mask on black. The clicking is not what takes the time, the edge review is.

These cover the online and free versions of the same question, and none of them replaces Photoshop for a difficult edge. Photopea is the closest because it uses the same mask logic, so a workflow learned here transfers directly.

Frequently Asked Questions

Start with one photo you know well, run the six steps, and check the edge over a real background before you build anything on top of it. Everything after the mask is normal editing; the mask itself is the part that decides whether the composite holds together. If you want the same result without a subscription, Photopea runs the identical workflow in a browser tab.