Quick Selection Tool doesn't work

This has probably been addressed, but can't seem to find it. It's driving me nuts.
In Elements 6.0, I have found the Quick Selection Tool quite useful. However, I often find that it does not work; not creating an outlined selection.
Have others found this? Do I have some setting incorrect? Is this an Adobe bug? I have reverted to all default settings, but no dice.
Thanks!

Ya, I can't make it work. I've watched a million videos online with people that seem to think it's amazing, but I have spent HOURS trying to cut out a simple image that would have taken me ten seconds on my ancient CS2. After owning this new product for two months I am still opening up my old version of Photoshop to extract images. Every time I start outlining something, the Quick Selection Tool goes all over the place, and when I do finally get it somewhat close to outlining what I want, I can't figure out how to save what I want. Lame.

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Which OS are you working on?
Please try resetting your tools from Photo Bin flyout menu.
1. Open Photo bin.
2. Click on Fly Out menu
3. Click on option Reset all Tools
4. Relaunch Editor13
and see if it helps.
Thanks,
Anwesha

Quick selection tool doesn't "snap" to edges. It works more like the lasso tool.

When I try to make a quick selection it doesn't snap to the edges of the objects or the edge of the image.

My apologies - I "drilled down" the Adobe site through CC > Photoshop so I thought that information was picked up. I have found the solution in the meantime - I has set the brush size to very small - so I will mark this as complete.
Thanks for your guidance for future enquiries.
John

Quick Selection Tool Doesn't Use Shift in the Expected Manner

Generally speaking, if you click somewhere with a tool that you stroke on an image, then hold the Shift key down and click somewhere else, the tool will be stroked in a straight line from the prior point to the current point. This is very handy under certain conditions.
However, I was just using the Quick Selection Tool to select the shadow of a microphone, and lo and behold an attempt to drag it along a straight line by holding down the Shift key did nothing.
It would be nice if this tool would work like all the others, and stroke a line between where it was and where it's currently being clicked if the Shift key is held down.
-Noel

I guess I can see the conflict (Shift to add vs. Shift to stroke), but honestly I have learned to use the Quick Selection tool with the default "press nothing and it adds, press Alt and it subtracts" setting, and just never found a use for the mode change.
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Why is PS CS4 Extended crashing when I use the quick selection tool, it was working fine yesterday..

...today I have updated the lastest software to version 11.02 and it is still crashing. Please can anyone help.

Without system information and the crash details nobody can say anything.
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Could you please post a screenshot with the pertinent Panels visible so we can see the Tool’s settings in the Options Bar and the selected Layer/s?

Quick select tool hangs and will not work

All of a sudden the quick select tool will not work/hangs up has a mind of its own and wanders/ after installing an upgrade to Nik software Color Efex Pro 4. I put that in the trash as I could not find a way to unistall. Probably still part of it in other areas?
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What gives. How do I get a clean copy of PS?

You're welcome.
hiking11 wrote:
…do you know how to find the installer on a Mac so I can uninstall some of the Nik software…
There is no such thing as a system wide uninstaller on a Mac. Only a few select applications, like some of Adobe's, install an application-specific Uninstaller, e.g. in the Utilities folder of your root level ./Applications folder. I have no idea if Nik provides such an uninstaller or not.
hiking11 wrote:
…Where you are have a Great Christmas season…
Well, thank you. Actually, I'm not that far from you in Northern California, some 100 miles NE of San Francisco. My user ID, Tai Lao, is just a phrase that means Too Old in Mandarin, and my signature, Wo Tai Lao Le, 我太老了, just reads I am Too Old in Mandarin too, Happy holidays to you too/
Wo Tai Lao Le
我太老了

Quick selection tool not working correctly

I am trying to extract a portion of a photo...i tried using the selection tool to extract the portion on another picture, and it worked GREAT!
Now i'm trying to use it in another photo and the refine image tool isn't extracting it into a new layer like it did with the other one!
is there something that i may have clicked or turned off that is preventing me from making this extraction??

Hello,
Could you be more specifc as to what you are doing here?
You mention using selections tools, including the Quick Selection tool, but these tools only create selections, they do not extract the material you have selected. A selection is like highlighting text in a word processor, after you have highlighted the text you can copy/paste it or modify it, but simply highlighting it doesn't do anything. Same with selections, once you have created a selection with a tool like Quick Selection you can how copy/paste it to a new image or perform adjustments to just that area.
I'm not sure what you mean by the "refine image tool", we don't have anything by that name. However, we do have a Refine Edge option that helps to make cleaner edges to your selection.
-Brett

Magic Quick Selection Tool NOT working right. Help please?

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It's the Quick Selection Tool in Photoshop Elements 9 and I'm trying to get the background and make it another layer so I can even out the color of the background then bring down the transparency. Not sure if that makes sense. I'm new to this.... Sometimes the area it will grab can go ...not fast.. but not slow. Sometimes it's like it's just messed up and literally takes 30 seconds to process each move. I rebooted my computer and re opened it and it helped a little. It's not clear what causes it when it messes up and when it doesn't. Just frustrating. It's probably user error because I'm so new at Photoshop. Thanks for your input. I really appreciate it.

I have a comment. I am very upset with Photoshop and all your tutorials regarding the quick select tool. I have watched many tutorials and read instructions until I am blue in the face. This tool does not work. It is all over the place and all of your

I have a comment. I am very upset with Photoshop and all your tutorials regarding the quick select tool. I have watched many tutorials and read instructions until I am blue in the face. This tool does not work. It is all over the place and all of your tutorials make it look so simple. How can you advertise this as a viable tool when it just doesn't work?

It is all over the place and all of your tutorials make it look so simple.
This is a user to user Forum, so you are not really addressing Adobe here, even though some Adobe employees thankfully have been dropping by.
How can you advertise this as a viable tool when it just doesn't work?
Concluding something does not work because you fail at using it is not necessarily always justified.
The Quick Selection Tool certainly has limitations, but your post seems to be more about venting than trouble-shooting – otherwise you might have posted an image where you failed to get an expected result.

When working with quick selection tool (and not only) the whole psd file gets damaged.

Hello there,
Since I first tried Photoshop CS6 on PC I encounter the following problem: when I use quick selection tool at some point the selection gets completely random and I see parts of my artwork disapear. Even after closing the file without saving the changes I see the artwork completely corrupted, without any possibility to recover. As if parts of the image were deleted.
The problem persisted after I changed to Creative Cloud on Mac (I'm running OS X 10.8.5.)
I have just seen that it also happens when I work with regular layer masks.
I desperately need to fix this problem because I cannot keep using hours of retouching work again and again.
Hope someone can help.
Cheers
Julia

I am also having the same exact issue. This is the third time this has happened in about six months. I use the quick selection tool and I see a alpha mask that looks truncated and it show random parts of the image in the mask which has nothing to do with the selection. But the worst part of this is that my retouching layer the only other layer comes back completely empty even if I try to save the file in various other file types like tiff and it comes back empty. I'm losing a lot of retouching time here. I also hope some else has an answer.
Thanks
Mike

Why is the "Quick Selection Tool" working so slowly? - Photoshop CC in Windows 7

Every time I try to use the Quick selection tool, it takes a REALLY long time to select. I had CS5 and it was super fast, even with large RAW files. Now with CC, it takes at least 20 minutes to select a person out of a photo.
I already tried "resetting" the tool - that did not work at all.
Please help!

I mentioned working on my laptop without GPU acceleration, and how much it slowed everything down, but Quick Select was still laggy after the driver updated and GPU acceleration restored. This is a reasonable laptop with i7, 16Gb and GTX680. Thankfully, I got my main system back yesterday, and Quick select is pretty much instant.
But there shouldn't be that much difference. The big box has six core running at 4.2Ghz (under load) 32GB and GTX570, so while it is certainly more powerful, the difference in performance in respect to Quick Select is not proportional. I've just tried reducing cache levels on the big box from the '6' it usually runs at right down to 2, but it still responds instantly even with large files. I have GPU set to Advanced, and tile size to 128 on both systems.
Another odd thing is that I only have 1GB vRAM with the GTX570, where the GTX680 has 4Gb of faster vRAM. But maybe Quick select is not a big user of GPU acceleration.
So no real help I am afraid. I have looked through the GPU FAQ, but nothing helpful there. OK, I have just found a more detailed article on GPU acceleration, and it mentions a lot of features, but not Quick Select, so it could be that GPU is irrelevant. The laptop is Windows 8.1 as opposed win 7 for the big box, if that makes a difference. Can you correlate anything between our systems? I hate to post this without any suggestions, but I'm stumped.
There are tricks to aid Quick select.
Make a copy of the layer, and apply Curves and/or Levels directly to the layer, and try to increase contrast between the subject and background. Use this layer to make the selection, then switch back to the normal layer to use the selection.
I don’t know if this will work as I have just thought of it. Copy the layer, and Free Transform it to a smaller size. It will be image dependant, but Quick Select is much faster with images below about 1500 pixels wide. Use Quick select on the smaller image layer, and copy the selection to a new layer. FT it back up to size, and it should fit. This would only be useful if you are going to use Refine Edge right after, and will have obvious limitations.
Make sure you report back if you find a solution.

Quick Selection tool in CS5 doesn't select everything

I hope I am posting in the correct place. If not, please tell me where to post my question, thanks.
I am using the quick selection tool to select my image. When I click on 'Refine Edge' it looks great. When I output to a new layer or new document, etc., parts of the image are missing.
For example, I have an image of two girls (attached). When I click 'Refine Edge,' it looks just the way I want. But if I choose to put it into a new document or new layer, the red-haired girl's hands and legs disappear. This isn't the first time this has happened - I just finally got frustrated enough to ask for help. Thanks and let me know what I am doing wrong.
(The first is B&W in 'refine edge', the second is Overlay view in 'refine edge', and the last one is the results (with disappearing hands and legs)

I assumed it wouldn’t help based on other comments. Using Mac OS X 10.9.3, ID CSS 6 version 8.
I just logged out and then logged in and the problem cleared up but did the same thing before and it cleared up and then came back. Any ideas why this is intermittent?
Thanks.

Quick selection tool error message

When I use the quick selection tool (or when I use content-aware scaling) I get an error message saying "could not complete your request because of a program error." I am working with NEF files, 4 GB of RAM, fast machine with plenty of scratch space, Radeon X1950 crossfire graphics card. With small .jpg files, the problem doesn't occur. Thanks for any help.

That's right, Chris... and even when I turn it off, it seems erratic as to whether or not the scaling works. I just tried it again and couldn't get it to work without the program error message even when I turned it off. I suspect that if I reboot the whole machine it might work but I'm not sure. Something is buggy in there.

Quick Selection Tool doesn't work

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