How to Clean Up Hair Selections in Photoshop using Enhance Edge
Learn how to improve hair and fur selections in Photoshop with the new Enhance Edge feature, which uses AI to clean up color fringing and halos around the edges of your subject when removing them from the background. You'll learn where to find Enhance Edge, how it works, how many generative credits it costs, and which images it can't fix.
Download the PDF: How to Clean Up Hair Selections with Enhance Edge
Photoshop’s automatic selection features, like Select Subject and Remove Background, can select a complex subject with one click.
But around fine details like hair or fur, even a great selection can leave color fringing, or halos, where color from the original background shows through along the edges.
Adobe’s new Enhance Edge feature is meant to fix this. It’s available in the Photoshop beta starting with version 27.11, and it uses AI to analyze the pixels along the edges of your layer mask and remove the background color bleeding through.
Despite its name, Enhance Edge doesn’t refine your layer mask, and what it actually does may surprise you. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to use it, how it works, and where it falls short.
Which Photoshop version do I need?
Enhance Edge is currently available only in the Photoshop beta (version 27.11 or higher), not in the official release.
The Photoshop beta is included in your Adobe Creative Cloud subscription and can be installed from the Creative Cloud Desktop app.
Let's get started!
Using Photoshop’s Enhance Edge to remove color fringing
We’ll look at two images: one where Enhance Edge removes color fringing well, and one where it doesn’t (and why).
I’ll start with this image of a woman with long flyaway hair posing against a blue background.
In the Layers panel, the image is on the Background layer.
Start with a layer mask
To use Enhance Edge, we first need a layer mask.
I don’t have one yet, so I’ll remove the woman from the background by clicking the Remove background button in Photoshop’s Contextual Task Bar.
At first glance, the result looks great. Photoshop did an excellent job separating the woman, including her hair, from the blue background behind her.
Remove Background doesn’t delete the background. It selects your subject and creates a layer mask that hides the background, which we can view in the Layers panel.
The details are hard to see in the small thumbnail, so I’ll hold Alt (Windows) / Option (Mac) and click the layer mask thumbnail.
Photoshop displays the full-size layer mask in the document window. The hair detail in the mask is impressive.
To switch back to your image, hold Alt (Windows) / Option (Mac) again and click the layer mask thumbnail in the Layers panel.
Viewing the color fringing around the edges
The layer mask looks highly detailed, but the original blue background is bleeding into the edges of her hair. We just can’t see it yet.
To view the color fringing, I’ll add a Solid Color fill layer below the image.
I’ll start by clicking the Create New Fill or Adjustment Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers panel.
Then I’ll choose a Solid Color fill layer from the menu.
In Photoshop’s Color Picker, I’ll choose black as my fill color and click OK.
Photoshop adds the new fill layer above the image, blocking the photo from view.
So in the Layers panel, I’ll drag the fill layer below the image.
With the cutout of the woman against the black background, the blue color fringing around her hair is now obvious.
This is where the new Enhance Edge feature comes in.
Where to find the new Enhance Edge feature
To access Enhance Edge, first select your layer mask in the Layers panel. It works with any existing layer mask, not only ones created with Remove Background, but the mask has to be selected.
Then click the Enhance edge button in the Contextual Task Bar.
You can also click the Enhance edge button in the Properties panel. If either button is greyed out, make sure your layer mask is selected.
An internet connection is required
Enhance Edge uses AI and runs in the cloud, so you’ll need an internet connection. There’s no option to run it locally on your computer (at least not yet).
A progress bar shows how long you’ll need to wait, but it rarely takes more than a few seconds.
When it’s done, the color fringing around the edges disappears.
On the left is the original Remove Background result with the blue halo around the hair.
On the right is the cleaned-up result after running Enhance Edge.
How Enhance Edge works (and why the name is misleading)
You may think Enhance Edge enhances the edges of your layer mask. That was my first guess. And like me, you’d be wrong.
Enhance Edge doesn’t touch your layer mask. Instead, Photoshop places the result on a new Enhanced edge
layer above your original image layer, with its own copy of the layer mask. It also turns off the original layer.
The two layer masks are identical. To prove it, the image on the left shows the original layer mask after running Remove Background, and the image on the right shows the Enhance Edge mask.
See a difference? Me neither.
To see what really happened, I’ll disable the Enhance Edge layer mask by holding Shift and clicking the mask thumbnail.
The X in the thumbnail means the layer mask is turned off.
Notice all the new image detail around the hair. Enhance Edge replaced the original edge pixels contaminated with the blue background color with new AI-generated pixels that match the color and tone of her hair.
So instead of cleaning up the edges of your mask, Enhance Edge changes the image itself, which is why it works on a copy of your image instead of the original.
It’s similar to how the Decontaminate Colors option in Select and Mask works, but it uses AI for a better result.
For comparison, the image on the left is the original, and the image on the right shows the added pixels around the hair after running Enhance Edge.
Yes, the AI-generated detail looks terrible, but only because the layer mask is disabled.
Turning the mask back on shows the true Enhance Edge result, with the edges cleaned up.
How many generative credits does Enhance Edge use?
Using Enhance Edge costs 20 generative credits. That makes it one of Photoshop’s more expensive AI features, and it’s a bit surprising for a feature that’s still in beta. There’s no word yet on what it will cost once it reaches the official Photoshop release.
To see how many generative credits you have remaining, click the Check Generative Credits icon in Photoshop’s upper right corner (I think of it as a dice icon because using generative AI always feels like rolling the dice.)
Where Enhance Edge struggles (and why)
Enhance Edge works best on images where the color fringing stays close to the edges. If the original background color extends too far inside the edge and into your subject, Enhance Edge won’t be as useful.
Here’s a cute image of a dog against a bright pink background.
Enhance Edge works equally well on fur, not just hair, but I’m using this photo as an example of when it will struggle.
After running Remove Background to separate the dog from the background, then adding a black fill layer behind the image, notice how much pink remains around the edges, because the color extends so far into the fur.
It almost looks like the dog was playing in wet paint (and loving every minute of it).
This time I’ll choose Enhance Edge a third way, by right-clicking the layer mask thumbnail in the Layers panel and choosing Enhance edge from the menu. Either of the earlier methods works too.
Sadly, because too much of the dog’s fur is contaminated by the background color, Enhance Edge couldn’t clean it up.
Even worse, I just wasted 20 generative credits thanks to the AI industry’s no refunds
policy.
And there we have it. The new AI-powered Enhance Edge feature in the Photoshop beta costs 20 generative credits, but it’s a fast and easy way to clean up color fringing in hair and fur selections, as long as the unwanted background color stays close to the edge and doesn’t bleed too far into your subject.
Don't forget, all of my Photoshop tutorials are available to download as PDFs!
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