How to reliably select only the face?

I’m trying to find a best way to select only the face of the person.

So farr I tried with multiple control points which works ok but definitely far from perfect. The points create holes in selection.

I also tried hue mask which looks like it does a better job but it selects for example faces of other persons in the photo. This looks like the best bet but I’m not sure how to easily exclude other places where I do not want the mask to be applied unless going with erase tool and erase everywhere. This would require lots of work.

Related to the question, is it possible to easily exclude areas using other mask types and also combine masks of different or same types?What I was thinking is to use multiple hue masks on the face, combine them and then use another mask type to select the face, invert that mask and exclude that mask.

Maybe I’m overthinking it. Is there a better way to select only the face? Or for that matter other parts of body like hair.

Hi Arts
There is a erasing tool at the end of the selection tools that once you have selected a tone or colour can be used to rub out or remove areas that you don’t want selected.

I don’t think DxO has the best selection tool right now for fine elements such as hair. This requires something like Photoshop but then even their tool is not perfect.
Hop this helps

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I think it is reasonable to say that the masking capabilities in PL are slipping well behind the competition. We can all point to the great demosaicing in PL but the quality across all apps is pretty good and differences are only visible to those who pixel peep. I love PL but it has some significant shortcomings imo.

Hello @artz, I always use the normal brush for faces because it works with softer transitions and it looks more natural.

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I use a normal control point and adjust size, feathering and chroma/ luma sliders - works just fine for me.

The normal control point is really great and very effective but it is far from a precision tool. The normal brush is the best for precision works but it is very very time consuming. Photolab is Ok if you have all the time in the world but for people that of different reasons value the time there are far better options today.

Despite that Photolab has many upsides and for every-day work like more than 95% of my pictures with modest precision demands, the normal control points can be very effective and often very much more effective than many of the competition’s tools.

As soon as the precision demands rises though, it gets very obvious that Photolab really lacks quite a few select and masking tools that most users see as mainstream even in RAW-converters today. Many will look elsewhere for those - especially professionals that don´t have the luxury of all the enthusiasts here to be more or less indifferent to productivity demands and competition.

Very few customers in these AI-powered days likes to pay extra for excessive or ineffective postprocessing made with unnecessarily ineffective tools today.

@artz

Do you tried the Auto mask?
This highly effective mask seems to be overlooked.

It has been improved (PL8) since this page was created.
Pascal

Thanks!

Didn’t realize there was a change in PL8 that was the reason it seems more effective recently rather than working at my meager skills.

I’m going to try it but so far it did not detect the fine edges quite well. I had more luck with control points and negative control points.