Know your enemy: the four edge problems
Move the comparison slider across transparent, white, and gray previews and decide which of these you are looking at before touching a tool.
An ear, wheel, sleeve, or petal is gone. Fix with smart restore — click or stroke inside the missing part.
A patch survives between legs, inside a handle, under an arm. Fix with smart erase inside the unwanted region.
A thin bright or dark ring from the old background. Fix with a manual erase brush along the edge.
Fur, hair, steam, defocus. Often not an error at all — keep partial transparency; use a soft brush only where color spill is real.
Repair from large to small
- Get the silhouette right at normal zoom
Shape errors matter more than pixels. Restore or erase the big regions first — scanning every pixel at maximum zoom is slow and produces unnaturally hard edges.
- One smart stroke, then verify
After each smart operation, hold the original comparison and walk the boundary of what changed. If it grabbed too much, undo once and retry smaller — never stack prompts on a bad selection.
- Manual brushes for the last few pixels
Isolated specks, narrow halos, details no model can guess. Brush slightly smaller than the correction; harder for product edges, softer for fur and fabric.
- Stop at destination quality
A one-pixel defect at 800% zoom is invisible in a 160-pixel thumbnail; a missing ear never is. Judge the result at the size and background where it will be published.
Before you export
- The overall silhouette was correct before pixel-level cleanup began.
- Every smart operation was verified immediately and undone if it touched unrelated areas.
- Manual brush hardness matches the material at each edge.
- The result was checked on more than one background at delivery size.
- The transparent master is downloaded before any layout or resizing work.