Path Distortion 1

[songsungpurple]

Hello, and a big thank you to everyone who participates on this board.

So. I've selected an area of a .JPG that I would like to separate out from the background. The picture is of a quilt hanging on a wall and is therefore not perfectly square. I used the magnetic lasso tool to select it and created a work path. I can now do as I please with the background, which is nice, but the selection tool has distorted the color of the edge of the quilt. The edge of the quilt is purple, but after selection (and repeated selections) it has a very thin rainbow of color all around the edge.

Should I use the paintbrush and go around the edge covering it up, or is there a place where I can see each pixel (it's been a long time, but I remember doing that on MacPaint in the late 80's)?

I'm embarassed to be asking such a basic question, but I'm so new and soooo very frustrated to be having this problem right off the bat.

Thanks!

Lesa

 

[hetzen]

If you have the selection, I'd take the quilt into a new layer, then create a mask from your selection (use the mask button in your layers window.

Then select the mask window in your quilt layer, then use a black front colour, with edit/stroke on say 2pixels centred, this will then trim about 1 pixel off the edges. You may want to play around with the thickness of the stroke to get a good result.

Also, if there are areas with have been eaten away by this process, you can paint back into the mask with white, which will be a hell of a lot easier than tring to paint out the edges.