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Chapter 04 · Selections & retouching
Selection and retouching are the two areas where Photopea most often surprises people who expected a toy. The selection model is a proper document-wide alpha map with partial coverage, not a marching-ants rectangle, and the retouching tools include content-aware healing that runs locally on the device in a second or two. For portrait retouching, product clean-up and background removal, this chapter covers the tools that do most of the real work.
The selection model
Photopea maintains a single document-wide selection map in which every pixel carries a value from zero to one hundred per cent. That is the same model Photoshop uses, and it has an important consequence: a selection is not attached to a layer. It constrains whatever you do next, wherever you do it. Paint with a fifty per cent selection active and your stroke lands at half strength. Apply a filter and it blends at the selection's coverage. This is more powerful than a simple on-or-off mask and it is the reason the feather parameter behaves the way it does.
The selection tools
| Tool | Key | Behaviour |
|---|---|---|
| Rectangle Select | M | Click-drag for a rectangular selection |
| Ellipse Select | M | Click-drag for an elliptical selection; hold Shift for a circle |
| Lasso | L | Freehand selection by click-drag |
| Polygonal Lasso | L | Click to add corners; Delete removes the last; Enter or double-click closes |
| Magnetic Lasso | L | Snaps to edges and places control points automatically |
| Magic Wand | W | Selects similar colours with a tolerance setting and optional contiguous mode |
| Quick Selection | W | Brush-based expansion using an internal guide layer; Alt subtracts |
| Object Selection | W | Draw a bounding box and the tool detects the object inside it |
| Colour Range | Select menu | Partial selection by colour similarity with a fuzziness control |
All of the tools share the same mode set: replace, union, subtract, intersect and exclude, plus a feather parameter. Learning the modifier keys for these is what separates slow selection work from fast selection work. In practice most people use three tools: the rectangle for crops and layout, the quick selection brush for subjects, and the magic wand for flat backgrounds such as scanned documents or product shots on white.
The Quick Selection tool deserves a note because its implementation is unusual. It uses an internal white-and-black guide layer to track what it has decided is inside and outside the selection, which is why it can refine its own boundary as you paint. Holding Alt switches to subtract mode. If the tool starts behaving oddly, deleting the guide layer and starting again is usually faster than trying to correct it.
Selection operations
Select All is Ctrl+A, Deselect is Ctrl+D and Inverse is Shift+Ctrl+I. Expand, Contract and Feather live under Select > Modify, and Transform Selection lets you scale or rotate the selection boundary itself without touching pixels. Dragging inside a selection with a selection tool moves it, but only in replace mode — in any other mode the drag adds to the selection instead, which is a common source of confusion.
Two shortcuts are worth memorising. Ctrl+clicking a layer thumbnail loads that layer's transparency as a selection, which is the fastest way to select the actual painted area of a layer including anti-aliased edges. And Quick Mask Mode on Q converts the selection into a red overlay you can paint with any brush, then converts it back. Quick Mask is preserved when you save as PSD, so a complex selection can survive a save and reopen.
Refine Edge
Refine Edge is available once a selection exists and uses a paint-based trimap: white means include, black means exclude, grey means uncertain, and the tool resolves the uncertain band. This is the correct tool for hair, fur, foliage and any edge where a hard selection produces a visible cut. PCMag's review noted a slight delay when painting in Refine Edge view, which matches our experience; it is usable but not instant on large images.
Subject selection and background removal
There are two distinct features here and they are often confused. Object Selection with its Subject Select button performs AI-assisted subject detection locally in the browser. Select > Remove BG performs one-click AI background removal and costs one AI credit, or one ad view on the free tier. The first gives you a selection you can refine; the second gives you a cut-out directly.
For most people the practical route is Remove BG when the subject is a person or product against a busy background, and Quick Selection or Object Selection when the background is simple and you want control. If you need the result as a transparent PNG and nothing else, our own background remover does the same job without an account, and chapter 8 explains where Photopea's AI stops.
Healing and cloning
| Tool | Key | What it actually does |
|---|---|---|
| Spot Healing Brush | J | Content-aware fill from surrounding pixels, computed locally; one to five seconds typically, up to ten when covering more than half the image |
| Healing Brush | J | Clones from a source like the clone stamp, then adapts the cloned content to the destination's colour and texture on release |
| Patch Tool | J | Select an area, drag it to a source region, and the patch adapts on release |
| Clone Stamp | S | Straight copy from a source point set with Alt+click; lower hardness for softer edges |
| Content-Aware Move | — | Moves an object and fills the vacated area with content-aware fill; added in version 4.9 |
The distinction between the Spot Healing Brush and the Healing Brush is the one that matters. Spot Healing needs no source point: you paint over the blemish and the tool invents plausible content from the surroundings. Healing Brush needs a source, and its value is that it matches the destination's lighting and texture, so a clone from a different part of a face does not look pasted. Clone Stamp does neither — it copies exactly, which is what you want for duplicating texture or removing an object by copying clean background over it.
The fact that Spot Healing runs locally rather than on a server is important and frequently misunderstood. It is not an AI credit operation, it works offline once the application has loaded, and it does not send your image anywhere. Chapter 8 covers the distinction between local processing and server-side AI in more detail, because the interface does not make it obvious.
Tonal and detail tools
Dodge lightens and Burn darkens, both on O, and both offer a range selector for shadows, midtones or highlights plus an exposure strength. Working within a range is what makes dodge and burn look natural rather than muddy: dodging highlights only, on a low exposure, builds up light gradually the way a darkroom printer would. Sponge, also on O, saturates or desaturates locally.
The Blur, Sharpen and Smudge tools apply their effect along the stroke with an adjustable strength. They are useful for small local corrections and bad for large ones; a Gaussian blur on a duplicate layer with a mask will always beat painting with the blur tool over a large area. Smudge spreads colour like a finger through wet paint, which is genuinely useful for skin and for blending composited edges.
Transformations
Free Transform on Alt+Ctrl+T covers scale, rotate, skew and perspective, with Ctrl+dragging a corner producing perspective distortion. Warp is part of Free Transform rather than a separate filter, and offers a sixteen-point deformation grid plus a set of predefined shapes such as Arch and Flag. That grid is coarse compared with Photoshop's mesh warp, and for complex distortion you will feel the difference.
Puppet Warp, from Edit > Puppet Warp, lets you pin points and drag the areas between them, with adjustable density and expansion. Content-Aware Scale, added in version 4.9, resizes a canvas while protecting recognised subjects such as people and buildings — useful for changing an aspect ratio without squashing the subject. Perspective Warp and Liquify are both present; Liquify pushes pixels for subtle shape correction and is the tool people reach for when straightening a jawline or a product edge.
Crop, canvas and image size
The Crop tool on C draws a crop rectangle that can be moved, resized and rotated, with confirm and cancel in the top bar. Image > Canvas Size changes the viewing window without scaling content, which is how you add a border or extend a background. Image > Image Size scales the content to new pixel dimensions and accepts a DPI value, which matters for print output and is covered in chapter 10.
Three commands that sound similar and do different things. Crop removes pixels outside a boundary. Canvas Size changes the document boundary without resampling, adding or removing space. Image Size resamples the artwork itself. If a client asks for "the same image but bigger", they usually mean Image Size; if they ask for "more space around it", they mean Canvas Size.
What this chapter means in practice
Selection and retouching are strong enough that most photographers and retouchers can work here without compromise. The tools behave as expected, the healing is content-aware and local, and the transform set covers everything short of heavy compositing. The gaps are the absence of a history brush and an art history brush, and a warp grid that is coarser than Photoshop's. Neither is disqualifying for normal work; both are noticeable for illustration and heavy compositing, which chapter 19 factors into the decision guide.