Manual

Getting Started

Installation

Fog Panther runs on Linux. Pick whichever install method fits your setup — visit the download page for the native packages, or use one of the universal runtimes.

If you prefer the terminal, a single command detects your distribution, downloads the right package, and installs it:

curl -fsSL https://fogpanther.com/install.sh | bash

This is the recommended path: it installs a native package, which means GNOME Files shows a preview when you press Space on a .fog or .psd file. Flatpak and Snap installs open and edit files normally but don't show previews in the file manager.

Once installed, launch Fog Panther from your application menu or by typing fogpanther in a terminal. The first time you open it, you'll see a short End User License Agreement. Fog Panther is free to use with no time limit — every tool works, no account needed, and you can save your work in Fog Panther's own .fog format. A license unlocks saving in every other format, along with Export, Export As, batch processing and printing. When you purchase a license, enter the key through Help > Enter License.

First Launch

After the splash screen, Fog Panther opens with an empty main window — no document is loaded. From here you can:

• File > Open (Ctrl+O) to open an existing image or .fog project
• File > New (Ctrl+N) to create a blank document
• File > Open Recent (Ctrl+Shift+O) to return to a file you worked on before

You can also drag an image straight onto the window — drop a RAW or JPEG straight from your camera card and it opens in a new tab. (With a document already open, a dropped image is placed into it as a new layer instead.) Until you enter a license, the menu bar shows [UNREGISTERED], and saving in a format other than .fog offers to purchase or enter a license, or to save as .fog instead.

Creating a New Document

Press Ctrl+N to open the New Document dialog. Here you set your canvas dimensions (in pixels, inches, centimeters, or millimeters), resolution, color mode, and background. The Preset list covers the most common use cases:

• Web — 1920×1080, 1280×720, and 800×600 for website mockups, banner ads, and UI work.
• Social media — square 1080×1080 and story 1080×1920.
• Photo prints — 4×6", 5×7", and 8×10" at 300 DPI.
• Print paper — A4, A5, and US Letter at 300 DPI, ready for offset or digital press.
• Icon sizes — square icons from 16×16 up to 512×512 pixels.
• Custom — set your own width, height, and resolution.

Pick a preset (or stay on Custom), choose a White, Black, or Transparent background, and click Create to drop into the main workspace. Tick Artboards if you're designing several screens or sizes side by side in one document.

Opening Files

Press Ctrl+O to open an existing image. Fog Panther reads all major formats including PSD and PSB, PNG, JPEG, TIFF, WebP, AVIF, HEIC, GIF, SVG, PDF, RAW, OpenRaster, Radiance HDR and OpenEXR, and its own .fog format. You can also drag and drop files directly onto the application window — even multiple files at once, each opening in its own tab.

Open a .psd file directly and Fog Panther preserves layers, masks, blend modes, and text — handy when a teammate hands you a layered document to pick up where they left off.

Getting Help

The Help menu has four items:

• User's Guide — Opens the full manual at fogpanther.com/guide.
• Purchase License — Buy a license to unlock every save format, Export and printing.
• Enter License — Activate a license you've already purchased.
• About Fog Panther — Shows your version and license status.

Can't find a tool or command? Press Ctrl+K to open the command palette and start typing — it jumps straight to any tool, filter, or menu action.

Interface Overview

The main window is split into six regions: the Menu Bar along the top (it doubles as the window's title bar — drag its empty space to move the window), the Tool Options bar just below it, the Tools column down the left, the Canvas in the center, the Panels stack on the right, and the Status Bar along the bottom. Everything is arranged to keep your canvas front and center while giving you quick access to the tools and panels you use most.

Toolbar

The vertical toolbar on the left side holds all your drawing and editing tools. Hover over any icon to see its name and keyboard shortcut in a tooltip. Some tools share a slot — you'll see a small triangle in the corner. Click and hold, or right-click, to reveal the hidden tools underneath (for instance, the Lasso Select, Polygonal Lasso, and Magnetic Lasso share the L slot).

As a photographer retouching portraits, you'll spend most of your time in just a handful of tools: the Healing Brush (J) for blemish removal, the Clone Stamp (S) for patching larger areas, and the Brush (B) for fine dodge-and-burn work on a separate layer.

Panels

The right side of the window holds a stack of dockable panels:

• Layers — Your layer stack, blend modes, opacity, fill, and locks.
• Channels — Individual color channels for advanced masking and compositing.
• Paths — Vector paths drawn with the Pen tool.
• Object Filters — The non-destructive filter stack attached to Embedded Objects.
• Typography — Advanced type controls for text layers (tracking, leading, OpenType features).
• Color and Swatches — Mix colors with sliders, and keep the ones you use again.
• Gradients and Patterns — Your libraries of gradients and patterns for fills, the Gradient tool, and layer effects.
• Brushes and Brush Settings — Brush presets, and the shape, spacing, and dynamics of the current brush.
• Properties — The settings of whatever is selected: an adjustment layer's controls, a mask's density and feather, a shape's or text's attributes.
• History — Every action you've taken, so you can jump back to any point.

Show or hide individual panels from the top-level Panels menu, or the whole side panel with Panels > Side Panels. The side panel is resizable — drag the vertical divider between canvas and panel to change its width. If you're working on a laptop with limited screen space, press Tab to temporarily hide the side panel for a distraction-free view.

Canvas

The central area is your canvas — the live view of your document. The checkerboard pattern you'll see behind transparent areas is a visual aid only; it won't appear in your exported files. Each open document has its own tab above the canvas, showing its name — an asterisk (*) marks unsaved changes.

Tool Options Bar

Directly above the canvas is a horizontal bar that changes depending on which tool is selected. When you pick the Brush tool, for example, the options bar shows brush size, hardness, opacity, flow, and blend mode. When you switch to the Text tool, it shows font family, size, alignment, and color. This context-sensitive bar means you never have to hunt through menus to adjust a tool — the controls you need are always right there. Hide or show the bar with View > Tool Options.

Status Bar

Along the bottom of each document, the status bar shows the canvas size (click it to switch between pixels, inches, millimeters, and centimeters), the resolution, and the color mode and bit depth, such as RGB/8. On the right are the zoom controls: zoom out, the zoom percentage (click it to pick an exact level such as 200% or 400%), zoom in, and fit to window.

Tools

Fog Panther ships with nearly forty tools, gathered into the four groups below. You can activate any tool by clicking its icon in the toolbar or pressing its keyboard shortcut. Learning the shortcuts will dramatically speed up your workflow — most professionals rarely touch the toolbar once they've memorized the keys.

Some tools share a key and cycle with Shift+key: Shift+V toggles Move / Artboard, Shift+M toggles the rectangle and ellipse Select shapes, Shift+L cycles Lasso Select / Polygonal Lasso / Magnetic Lasso, Shift+W cycles Magic Wand / Smart Selection / Object Selection, Shift+C cycles Crop / Perspective Crop / Slice / Slice Select, Shift+B toggles Brush / Pencil, Shift+S toggles Clone Stamp / Pattern Stamp, Shift+J cycles Healing Brush / Spot Healing Brush / Red Eye, Shift+G toggles Paint Bucket / Gradient, and Shift+A toggles Path Selection / Direct Selection. Right-click (or long-press) a tool button to see any alternatives hidden in its group. A few tools have no key of their own; give them one in Preferences > Keyboard Shortcuts.

Selection Tools

Selection tools let you isolate a region of your image so that edits only affect that area. They're essential for compositing, targeted color correction, and cutting objects out of backgrounds.

Tool	Shortcut	What It Does
Select	M	Draw a rectangular or elliptical selection — choose the shape (or a single row or column of pixels) in the Tool Options bar, or toggle rectangle and ellipse with Shift+M. Hold Shift while dragging to constrain to a perfect square or circle. Great for cropping a section of a photo, selecting a UI element, or isolating a circular object like a button, badge, or the iris of an eye during portrait retouching.
Lasso Select	L	Draw a freehand selection outline by clicking and dragging. Use this when you need to quickly select an irregularly shaped area — for example, tracing around a person's silhouette to separate them from a busy background. Press Shift+L for the Polygonal Lasso, which draws straight edges click by click, and again for the Magnetic Lasso, which snaps to high-contrast edges as you trace.
Magic Wand	W	Click on a color to select all contiguous pixels of a similar hue. Adjust the tolerance in the tool options to be more or less strict. Perfect for selecting solid-color backgrounds — a product photographer can click on a white studio backdrop to select and replace it in seconds. Press Shift+W for Smart Selection, which grows the selection to the subject's edges as you brush over it, and again for Object Selection: draw a box or lasso around an object and it selects the object inside.
Background Remove	—	Separates a subject from its background in one go: click Auto-Detect, refine with Keep and Remove strokes, then apply the result as a selection, a mask, or a new layer. Ideal for portraits and product shots, down to fine flyaway hair.

Painting Tools

Whether you're painting a digital illustration from scratch, hand-coloring a black and white photo, or retouching skin, these are the tools you'll reach for.

Tool	Shortcut	What It Does
Brush	B	The workhorse painting tool. Paint strokes with full pressure sensitivity if you're using a graphics tablet. Press [ and ] to resize the brush, Shift+[ and Shift+] to change hardness, and click once, then Shift+click to paint a perfectly straight line between the two points. Digital artists use the Brush for everything from rough sketching to final detail rendering. Portrait photographers use it on a low-opacity layer to dodge and burn — painting white to brighten highlights and black to deepen shadows.
Pencil	Shift+B (cycle)	Cycle off the Brush with Shift+B to draw hard-edged, aliased pixels with no anti-aliasing. This is the tool of choice for pixel artists creating game sprites or retro-style icons — each stroke lands exactly on the pixel grid with no blurring.
Adjustment Brush	—	Paint an adjustment onto just part of the image: the brush paints the mask of an adjustment layer, so you can brighten a face or warm a sky by brushing over it, and change the adjustment's settings afterwards.
Eraser	E	Removes pixels, leaving transparency (on the Background layer it paints the background color instead). Use a soft-edged eraser on a layer mask to gently fade the edges of a composited element into the scene below.
Paint Bucket	G	Fills a contiguous region with the foreground color or a pattern. Use it to quickly fill flat areas of a design — for example, coloring the background panel of a poster layout or filling line art with base colors.
Gradient	Shift+G (cycle)	Cycle off the Paint Bucket with Shift+G to draw smooth color transitions between two or more colors. Choose from linear, radial, angle, reflected, and diamond styles. Designers use gradients for everything from subtle background washes to eye-catching header overlays. Photographers use them on layer masks to create smooth exposure blends — for example, darkening an overexposed sky without affecting the foreground.
Clone Stamp	S	Paints a copy of pixels sampled from another part of the image. Hold Alt and click to set the source point, then paint where you want the cloned pixels to appear. Photographers rely on this to remove distracting elements — erase a stray power line from a landscape shot, or clone grass over a piece of litter in a park scene. Press Shift+S for the Pattern Stamp, which paints with a pattern instead.
History Brush	Y	Paints pixels back from an earlier state in the History panel — undo an edit in just one area, such as restoring detail in the eyes after softening a whole face.
Dodge/Burn	O	Lightens (Dodge) or darkens (Burn) the areas you paint over. Set the Range to Shadows, Midtones, or Highlights to target just those tones, and keep the Exposure low for subtle results.
Blur / Sharpen / Smudge	—	Three brushes in one toolbar slot: Blur softens the pixels you paint over, Sharpen crisps them up, and Smudge pushes color around like a finger through wet paint.

Transform Tools

Transform tools let you reposition, resize, and reshape layers and selections, and move around the canvas.

Tool	Shortcut	What It Does
Move	V	Click and drag to move the current layer, selection, or guide. When compositing elements from different photos — say, dropping a product onto a new background — you'll use Move to position each piece exactly where you want it. Hold Shift while dragging to constrain movement to horizontal, vertical, or 45°.
Artboard	Shift+V (cycle)	Draw and resize artboards — separate canvases inside one document, perfect for designing a set of social posts or several screen sizes side by side.
Crop	C	Draw a crop region and press Enter to trim the canvas. Use this to tighten a portrait composition, straighten a tilted horizon by rotating the crop box (drag outside it), or cut a large photograph down to a specific aspect ratio like 16:9 for a website hero image or 1:1 for Instagram. The Slice tools in the same group cut a web design into separately exported pieces.
Perspective Crop	Shift+C (cycle)	Place four corners on something photographed at an angle — a painting, a document, a building facade — and the crop straightens it into a flat rectangle.
Transform	Ctrl+T	Enters free-transform mode, where you can scale, rotate, and flip the current layer or selection using handles, or type exact values in the options bar. A designer placing a logo onto a product mockup would use Transform to scale and rotate the logo into the correct position. For angled surfaces, use Edit > Perspective Transform. Press Enter to apply or Esc to cancel.
Warp	Edit > Warp	Push, pull, and reshape pixels with a flexible mesh. Drag points on the warp grid to bend artwork around a curved surface or nudge a reflection into place — far more freedom than the corner handles of a free transform. Press Enter to apply or Esc to cancel.
Hand	H	Pan around the canvas by dragging, without changing your active tool's state. Handy when you're zoomed in on detail work and need to reach another part of the image. You can also pan at any time by holding Space and dragging, or with a middle-click drag.
Rotate View	R	Turn the view, not the image, so you can paint or draw at a comfortable angle, just as you'd turn a sheet of paper. Hold Shift for 15° steps; press Esc to set it straight again.
Zoom	Z	Click to zoom in, Alt+click to zoom out, or drag left and right to zoom smoothly. Double-click its toolbar button to jump to 100%.

Advanced Tools

Tool	Shortcut	What It Does
Text	T	Click on the canvas to place a text cursor, or click and drag to define a text box with word wrapping. Covered in detail in the Text & Typography section below.
Eyedropper	I	Click anywhere on the canvas to sample a color and set it as your foreground color. Designers use this constantly — sample a color from a client's brand photo to match it exactly in a layout, or pick a sky color to use as a background gradient. With a painting tool, hold Alt to sample without switching tools.
Pen	P	Create precise vector paths using Bezier curves. The Pen tool gives you the cleanest possible selections for cutting out objects with smooth, hard edges — like a product bottle or a car silhouette. Click to place anchor points, and click-drag to add curve handles. When you close the path, convert it to a selection (Ctrl+Enter) or use it as a vector mask.
Path Selection	A	Select and move whole paths and shape outlines. Press Shift+A for Direct Selection, which moves individual anchor points and curve handles.
Shape	U	Draw vector rectangles (with optional rounded corners), ellipses, and lines with clean, resolution-independent edges. Each shape gets its own layer. Use it for UI mockups, geometric poster elements, or icon design — anything where you want crisp corners that stay sharp at any zoom level.
Frame	K	Draw a frame — a rectangle, ellipse, or other shape — and place an image inside it. The frame crops the image to its shape, and you can swap or reposition the picture later without redrawing the frame. Great for photo layouts and collages.
Healing Brush	J	Like the Clone Stamp, but smarter — it samples texture from a source area and blends it with the color and lighting of the destination, producing seamless results. Portrait photographers use this to remove skin blemishes: Alt+Click on a nearby area of clean skin to set the source, then paint over the blemish. The Healing Brush matches the surrounding tone automatically, so the fix looks natural even across areas with varying lighting or skin color. Press Shift+J to cycle through the rest of the retouch group: Spot Healing Brush (click-once blemish removal with no source sampling) and Red Eye (click a pupil to neutralize flash-red).

Layers

Layers are the backbone of non-destructive editing. Think of them as transparent sheets stacked on top of each other — each sheet can hold its own content, and you can rearrange, hide, or blend them together without permanently altering anything. Nearly every professional workflow depends on layers, whether you're compositing a magazine cover, retouching a portrait, or designing a poster.

Layer Types

• Raster layers — Standard pixel layers where you paint, paste photos, and apply filters. When a photographer composites a subject onto a new background, each element lives on its own raster layer so it can be repositioned or masked independently.
• Text layers — Editable text that you can change at any time without re-creating it. A poster designer can tweak the headline wording, switch fonts, or change the color weeks later without starting over.
• Adjustment layers — Non-destructive color and tonal corrections (Curves, Levels, Hue/Saturation, and more) that affect all layers beneath them. Since they don't touch your original pixels, you can tweak or delete them at any point. A photographer might stack a Curves adjustment to boost midtone contrast and a Hue/Saturation adjustment to warm the shadows — then revisit either adjustment days later to fine-tune for a different print run. Add one from Layer > New Adjustment Layer.
• Fill layers — A solid color, gradient, or pattern that fills the whole canvas and stays editable (Layer > New Fill Layer). Perfect for a backdrop you may want to recolor later.
• Shape layers — Every shape you draw with the Shape tool gets its own layer, so it stays crisp and editable — change its size, corners, or color at any time.
• Embedded objects — Embedded files that preserve the original full-resolution data no matter how many times you scale, rotate, or warp them. Place a client's high-res logo as an Embedded Object into your design, scale it down for a business card, and later scale it back up for a banner — no quality loss.
• Layer groups — Collapsible folders that help you organize complex projects. A web designer building a homepage mockup might group all header elements (logo, navigation, hero image) into one group and all footer elements into another, keeping the layer stack manageable even with dozens of layers. Select two or more layers and press Ctrl+G to group them.
• Artboards — Groups that act as separate canvases in one document, each with its own size and background. Make them with the Artboard tool or Layer > Artboards.
• Frames — Shapes that hold an image, made with the Frame tool (K). The frame crops the picture inside it, and you can swap the picture later.
• The Background layer — The bottom layer of a newly opened photo. You can paint on it and filter it, but it can't be moved, made transparent, or restacked. Click its padlock to turn it into an ordinary layer.

Layer Masks

A layer mask is a grayscale channel attached to a layer that controls which parts are visible. White areas of the mask show the layer, black areas hide it, and shades of gray create partial transparency.

To add a mask, click the Add Layer Mask button at the bottom of the Layers panel (with a selection active, the mask follows it), or right-click a layer and choose Add Mask (Reveal All). Then select the Brush tool (B), set your foreground color to black, and paint over the areas you want to hide. Switch to white (press X to swap colors) to reveal them again.

Real-world example: Suppose you're blending two exposures of the same landscape — one exposed for the sky and one for the foreground. Place the sky exposure on top, add a layer mask, and paint with a soft black brush along the horizon line. The darker foreground from the layer below shows through seamlessly, giving you a perfectly balanced image without any HDR artifacts.

Blend Modes

Blend modes control how a layer's pixels interact with the layers beneath it. Select a blend mode from the dropdown at the top of the Layers panel. Here are the modes you'll use most:

• Multiply — Darkens the image by multiplying color values. Designers use this to overlay dark textures onto a photo or to make a scanned line drawing's white paper transparent so only the ink lines show through.
• Screen — Lightens the image. Use it to add light effects like lens flares or to brighten an underexposed photo by duplicating the layer and setting the copy to Screen.
• Overlay — Boosts contrast by combining Multiply and Screen. A popular sharpening technique: duplicate your layer, apply a High Pass filter, and set the result to Overlay. Only the edges get sharpened while flat areas stay untouched.
• Soft Light — A subtler version of Overlay. Photographers fill a new layer with 50% gray, set it to Soft Light, then paint with white to dodge (lighten) and black to burn (darken) — a completely non-destructive way to sculpt light and shadow in portraits.

Locks, Opacity, and Fill

Beside the blend mode at the top of the Layers panel are the layer's Opacity and, below it, its Fill. Opacity fades the whole layer, including its layer effects; Fill fades only the layer's own pixels, so you can have, say, a drop shadow or a stroke on a shape whose fill is invisible.

The lock buttons next to Fill protect a layer from accidental changes:

• Lock transparent pixels (/) — Paint only where the layer already has pixels; ideal for recoloring an object without spilling over its edges.
• Lock image pixels — No painting or filtering, but the layer can still be moved.
• Lock position — The layer can't be moved or transformed.
• Prevent auto-nesting — Moving the layer won't drop it into or out of an artboard.
• Lock all (Ctrl+/) — Everything is frozen.

A locked layer shows a padlock in its row; click the padlock to unlock it.

Keyboard Shortcuts

The digit shortcut sets the active layer's opacity — great for quick before/after comparisons. Type two digits quickly for an exact value (4 then 5 for 45%). With a painting tool active, the digits set the tool's opacity instead. Switch to the Move tool first if you're editing a text layer, otherwise the digits type numbers instead.

Selections

Selections let you fence off a part of your image so that painting, filters, and adjustments only affect that area. The boundary appears as an animated dashed outline, often called "marching ants." Mastering selections is one of the most important skills in image editing — it's what allows you to change a sky without touching the foreground, recolor a single object, or cut a product out of its background for an e-commerce listing.

Combining Selections

You can build complex selections by combining simple ones. Hold these modifier keys while drawing a new selection:

• Shift — Add to the existing selection. Draw multiple rectangles or lasso shapes and they merge into one selection.
• Alt — Subtract from the selection. Use this to carve out holes or trim edges.
• Shift+Alt — Intersect. Keep only the overlap between the old and new selections.

Real-world example: You're cutting out a model from a studio backdrop. Start with the Magic Wand (W) to click the white background — it selects most of it instantly. Then hold Shift and click on missed pockets (between the arm and body, for instance) to add them. Finally, invert the selection (Ctrl+Shift+I) so the model is selected instead of the background. Copy the model to a new layer (Ctrl+J) and you have a clean cutout ready for compositing.

Feathering

A hard selection edge can look unnatural, especially when compositing. Feathering softens the edge by gradually fading the selection over a specified number of pixels. After making a selection, press Shift+F6 to set a feather radius. A value of 1-3 pixels produces a subtle, natural transition; higher values create a dreamy, vignette-style fade.

Quick Mask Mode

Press Q to enter Quick Mask mode. Your image gets a translucent red overlay — red areas are outside the selection, clear areas are inside. Now you can use any painting tool to refine the selection: paint with black to deselect (add red), paint with white to select (remove red). This is incredibly powerful for tricky edges like hair or fur, where geometric selection tools struggle. Press Q again (or click the Quick Mask button below the color swatches in the toolbar) to return to the standard marching-ants view.

For the trickiest edges, Select > Select and Mask (Ctrl+Alt+R) opens a workspace for refining a selection's edge, and Select > Subject selects the main subject of a photo in one click.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Filters & Adjustments

Filters process your pixels to achieve a wide range of effects — from sharpening a soft photograph to creating stylized artistic looks. Access them from the Filter menu. Most filters display a live preview so you can dial in the settings before committing. Right after applying one, Edit > Fade (Ctrl+Shift+F) lets you dial its strength back or change how it blends.

If you want to stay non-destructive, apply filters to Embedded Objects — they become Object Filters that you can re-edit, reorder, or remove at any time.

Blur Filters

• Gaussian Blur — A smooth, even blur controlled by radius. Use it to soften a distracting background behind a product shot, or to blur a duplicate layer and subtract it for frequency separation (a skin retouching technique that separates texture from color).
• Motion Blur — Simulates the streak left by a moving object or camera. Set the angle and distance to add a sense of speed to a stationary car photo, or blur the background behind a runner to create the impression of motion.
• Surface Blur — Smooths flat areas while keeping edges sharp, controlled by Radius and Threshold. Retouchers use it to even out skin or a noisy sky without softening eyes, hair, or horizons. The Blur menu also has Box Blur and Radial Blur.

Sharpen Filters

• Sharpen — Classic edge sharpening: it increases contrast along edges, with an Amount (strength) and a Radius (edge width).
• Advanced Sharpen — Finer control: besides Amount and Radius, choose what to Remove — a Gaussian, lens, or motion blur — so the sharpening targets the kind of softness in your photo. For web images, try Amount 80-120% and Radius 0.5-1.0. For print, increase the Radius to 1.5-2.0 since print softens things a bit during reproduction.
• High Pass — Turns the entire image neutral gray except for edges, which retain their contrast. Duplicate your photo layer, apply High Pass with a radius of 2-5 pixels, and set the blend mode to Overlay. You'll get crisp edges without amplifying noise in flat areas — a favorite technique among landscape and architectural photographers.

Distort Filters

• Distort Brush — An interactive tool for pushing, pulling, and warping pixels by painting with specialized brushes. Fashion retouchers use it for subtle adjustments — smoothing the line of a garment, fixing a flyaway hair, or gently reshaping a pose.
• Spherize, Twirl, Pinch, Ripple, Wave, and ZigZag — Bend the image into bulges, spirals, and waves, for creative effects and textures. To correct converging verticals in architectural photos, use Edit > Perspective Transform or the Perspective Crop tool instead.

Noise Filters

• Add Noise — Introduces random grain in uniform or Gaussian patterns. Adding a subtle noise overlay to digital illustrations or overly smooth gradients gives them an organic, film-like texture that feels less sterile.
• Reduce Noise — Reduces noise while preserving detail, with separate control over color noise. Essential for high-ISO night photography or low-light concert shots, where sensor noise can overpower fine details.

Stylize & Pixelate Filters

• Halftone Channels — Turns each color channel into a printer's halftone dot pattern, for a vintage print or pop-art look.
• Emboss, Find Edges, Solarize, and Wind — Classic stylizing effects: raised relief, line-art edges, a part-negative darkroom look, and streaks blown across the image.
• Mosaic and Crystallize — Break the image into square blocks or crystal-like cells, to pixelate a face or license plate or for a graphic texture.

Adjustments

Color and tonal adjustments can be applied directly to a layer from Image > Adjustments or, for maximum flexibility, as adjustment layers (Layer > New Adjustment Layer) that sit in the Layers panel and affect everything below them. For photos, Filter > Photo Editor gathers white balance, exposure, tone, color, and detail controls in one window, with a live histogram.

• Curves (Ctrl+M) — The most powerful tonal tool. Drag points on the curve to brighten highlights, darken shadows, or boost midtone contrast. For an S-curve that adds punch: pull the shadows quarter down slightly, push the highlights quarter up slightly. Photographers doing color grading can edit the Red, Green, and Blue channels independently to shift the mood of an image — lifting the blue shadows and warming the highlights to get a cinematic teal-and-orange look.
• Levels (Ctrl+L) — Adjusts the black point, white point, and midtone gamma with a simple three-slider interface. Drag the black slider inward to deepen the darkest tones, and the white slider inward to brighten the lightest. A quick Levels correction is often the first step in any photo edit to ensure the image uses the full tonal range.
• Hue/Saturation (Ctrl+U) — Shift the hue of the entire image or target specific color ranges. A product photographer can isolate the Reds and shift them toward orange to match a brand's color palette, or desaturate the Greens in a landscape to create a moody, muted look.
• Brightness/Contrast — Straightforward sliders for quick global adjustments. Good for fast corrections when you don't need the precision of Curves or Levels.
• Color Balance (Ctrl+B) — Fine-tune color separately for shadows, midtones, and highlights. Push warmth into the highlights while keeping shadows cool for a natural, three-dimensional feel.
• Invert (Ctrl+I) — Flips all colors to their opposites, creating a negative. Useful for inverting masks (turning a "select background" mask into a "select subject" mask) and as a creative effect.
• Desaturate (Ctrl+Shift+U) — Converts the image or layer to grayscale while keeping the RGB color mode. Photographers converting portraits to black and white often start here, then add a Channel Mixer adjustment layer for finer control over how each color translates to a shade of gray.
• Posterize — Reduces the number of tonal levels, giving the image a flat, graphic look. Graphic designers use posterization as a starting point for screen-printed poster artwork or pop-art style portraits.

Text & Typography

Press T to activate the Text tool. Click anywhere on the canvas to start typing at a single point, or click and drag to define a text box — text inside a box will wrap automatically when it reaches the edge, which is what you want for paragraphs, captions, and body copy.

Font Selection

Fog Panther has access to all fonts installed on your system. The font picker in the tool options bar shows each font's name drawn in that font, so you can scroll through and compare options visually. Type in its search field to narrow down a long font list by name or by language.

When you save your work in the .fog format, fonts are embedded directly in the file. This means you can share the file with a colleague or open it on a different machine and the text will render correctly, even if those fonts aren't installed there.

Formatting Options

• Font family, size, weight, and style — Set the typeface, point size, and choose bold, italic, or a combination.
• Character spacing (tracking) — Increase or decrease the space between all characters. Tighten tracking on a large headline for a more compact, editorial look, or loosen it on uppercase subheadings for an elegant, airy feel.
• Line height (leading) — Control the vertical space between lines of text. Generous leading (1.5× or more) makes body text in a print brochure feel open and readable.
• Text alignment — Left, center, right, and justify. Use justify for magazine-style columns, but watch for awkward spacing in short lines.
• Text color and stroke — Set the text color in the options bar; for a gradient fill or an outline (stroke), add a Gradient Overlay or Stroke from Layer > Layer Effects. Event poster designers often use a white headline with a dark stroke so the text reads clearly over any photo.
• Anti-aliasing — Choose None for hard, pixel-exact edges (handy for pixel art), or any of the smoothing options for clean, soft edges.

Editing Text Later

Click the text on canvas with the Text tool, or double-click it with the Move tool, to re-enter editing mode. Text layers remain fully editable — you can rewrite the copy, change the font, adjust the size, or recolor it at any time. This is why designers keep text as live type for as long as possible.

You can also apply layer styles to text without rasterizing it. Add a drop shadow to lift a heading off the background, a gradient overlay for a metallic look, or an outer glow for neon-sign effects. The text stays editable throughout.

If you need to apply pixel-level filters to text (like a blur or distort), click Convert to Pixels in the Text tool's options bar. Be aware that this is a one-way operation — you won't be able to edit the text as type after rasterizing.

File Formats

The Native .fog Format

The .fog format is Fog Panther's own file format. It captures your entire project state with perfect fidelity — every layer, mask, adjustment layer, Embedded Object, text layer, blend mode, and embedded font is preserved exactly as you left it. Always save a .fog copy of your work so you can return to it later with full editability.

Think of the .fog file as your master document and exported formats (PNG, JPEG, etc.) as delivery copies. A photographer might keep the .fog file with all retouching layers intact and export a flattened JPEG for the client and a TIFF for the printer.

Supported Formats

Save vs. Export

Save (Ctrl+S) writes your full project — a new document in the .fog format, or a file you opened (a PSD, a TIFF, a PNG) back to its own format. If saving would lose something, such as layers in a JPEG, Save opens Save As instead. Save As (Ctrl+Shift+S) lets you choose a new name, location, or format. Use Save for work in progress so you keep layers, text, history, and everything else exactly as you left it.

File > Export is designed for producing delivery files. Export As (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+W) opens a dialog where you choose PNG, JPEG, WebP, AVIF, or GIF, set the quality, and optionally resize the image, with a live preview and file-size estimate. For instance, you might export a web-ready JPEG at 1200px wide and quality 82, while keeping your full-resolution .fog master untouched. Quick Export as PNG (Ctrl+Shift+') skips the dialog, and the same submenu exports slices and artboards.

Color Management

Color Picker

Click the foreground or background color swatch in the toolbar to open the color picker. It gives you several ways to choose a color:

• Color square and hue strip — Pick the hue on the vertical strip, then click in the square for saturation and brightness.
• Sliders — Dial in exact values as RGB (0-255), HSV, HSL, or CMYK percentages, plus an alpha (opacity) slider.
• Recent colors and swatches — Reuse a color you picked earlier, or add the new one to your Swatches.
• Hex input — Type a hex code like #2563eb directly. Web designers working from a brand style guide will use this constantly.

The picker also warns when a color falls outside what your print profile can reproduce. You can sample a color from the canvas with its eyedropper button, or at any time by pressing I to activate the Eyedropper tool and clicking on the pixel you want.

Foreground & Background Colors

The toolbar shows two overlapping swatches — the top-left one is your foreground color (used by brushes, text, and fills) and the bottom-right one is your background color (used by the eraser on the Background layer and as the second color in gradients). The Color and Swatches panels set them too.

• Press X to swap the two colors instantly. Useful when painting a mask — paint with black to hide, press X, paint with white to reveal.
• Press D to reset to the default black foreground and white background.

ICC Profiles and Soft-Proofing

Fog Panther supports ICC color profiles for accurate color reproduction across devices. You can assign a profile to your document via Edit > Assign Profile — this tells the software (and the printer or display) how to interpret the color values — or convert its colors to another profile with Edit > Convert to Profile. Your default working spaces live in Edit > Color Settings (Shift+Ctrl+K).

For print work, soft-proofing simulates on your screen how the image will look when printed with a specific profile. A print shop will typically provide you with their press profile (e.g., a FOGRA39 or GRACoL profile). Choose it in View > Proof Setup, then turn on View > Proof Colors (Ctrl+Y). Add View > Gamut Warning (Ctrl+Shift+Y) to highlight out-of-gamut colors, and you can fix them before sending the job to press — saving you an expensive reprint.

Color Modes and Bit Depth

Most work happens in RGB, but you can switch the document's color mode under Image > Mode. CMYK is there for print, and Grayscale for black-and-white work; a few specialist modes (Bitmap, Lab, Indexed, and Multichannel for spot-color print separations) are available too. You don't need these to get started — RGB is the right choice for almost everything on screen and web.

Change the bit depth in the same Image > Mode menu (8 Bits/Channel, 16 Bits/Channel, or 32 Bits/Channel):

• 8-bit — 256 levels per channel, suitable for most web and screen work.
• 16-bit — 65,536 levels per channel, great for high-quality photo editing and print. Working in 16-bit prevents banding in smooth gradients (like blue skies) and gives you more latitude when pushing tonal adjustments in Curves or Levels.
• 32-bit float — for high dynamic range (HDR) images, such as OpenEXR and Radiance HDR files.

History & Undo

Undo / Redo

Press Ctrl+Z to undo your last action and Ctrl+Shift+Z to redo it. The number of undo steps is limited only by the memory budget you set in Preferences > Performance; when it fills up, the oldest steps are dropped. So if you paint a hundred brush strokes and then decide the whole approach is wrong, you can undo every single one.

History Panel

The History panel gives you a visual timeline of every edit you've made to the document, from the moment you opened it. Each entry shows an icon and the action name (e.g., "Brush Stroke," "Gaussian Blur," "Move Layer"). Click on any entry to jump straight back to that state — everything after that point grays out. If you make a new edit from that point, the grayed-out entries are replaced.

Real-world example: You're retouching a portrait and have spent the last twenty minutes smoothing skin, dodging and burning, and adjusting color. The client calls and says they prefer the look from before you did the color grading. Instead of undoing step by step, open the History panel, scroll up to the state right before your color work, and click it. Done in one click.

Snapshots

Snapshots let you bookmark the full document state at a particular moment. Click the camera icon at the bottom of the History panel to take a snapshot. Snapshots appear at the top of the History panel and last until you close the document. Clicking a snapshot restores it; since that starts a fresh undo history, Fog Panther asks first.

This is powerful when you want to try multiple creative directions without losing your work. For example, a designer exploring two different color palettes for a poster can take a snapshot of version A, try version B, and go back to version A in one click if B doesn't work out. When you save the document in .fog format, the full undo history is preserved with the file — close today, reopen next week, and every step is still there.

View & Navigation

Efficient navigation keeps you in flow. Whether you're scanning a 50-megapixel landscape for dust spots or checking a single pixel in an icon, these controls help you get around your canvas quickly.

Zoom

The zoom keys are bare — no Ctrl needed. The scroll wheel zooms toward the cursor; there is no separate canvas-scroll mode.

Panning

Hold Space and drag to pan around the canvas, or middle-click and drag if you'd rather skip the modifier. Both work no matter which tool is active, so you never have to switch away from your current tool to reposition. For a bird's-eye view of a large document, hold H and press the mouse button: the whole image appears, and when you release the button the view zooms back in wherever the pointer is.

Rulers & Guides

Toggle rulers with View > Rulers. They appear along the top and left edges of the canvas, showing measurements in your chosen unit (pixels, inches, centimeters, millimeters, points, picas, or percent).

To create a guide, click inside a ruler and drag onto the canvas. A thin colored line appears. Guides are non-printing reference lines that help you align elements precisely. A print designer laying out a magazine spread might drag guides from the rulers to mark column boundaries, margins, and the gutter — or set them all up at once with View > New Guide Layout. Use View > Lock Guides to keep them from moving, and View > Clear Guides to remove them all when you're done.

Snapping

Enable snapping with View > Snap, and choose what to snap to in View > Snap To: guides, canvas edges, and slices. When active, layers, selections, and crop boxes snap into place as you drag them near. This makes precise alignment effortless — a UI designer can snap elements to the canvas edges, and a photographer can snap a crop boundary to a guide placed at the rule-of-thirds position.

Grid

Show the grid with View > Show > Grid. The grid overlays a regular pattern of lines on the canvas for spatial reference, handy for checking alignment and spacing at a glance. The same Show submenu toggles guides, slices, and artboard names, and View > Extras (Ctrl+H) hides or shows the selection edges, guides, and grid all at once.

Preferences

Open Preferences with Ctrl+, or via File > Preferences. The dialog has six tabs. You don't need to touch any of this to start — come back once you know what feels off for your workflow.

General

• Default new-document settings — Width, height, resolution, and background for the New Document dialog, so every fresh canvas starts the way you want.
• Tools — Choose whether grouped tools cycle with Shift+key or with the key alone.
• Pen Pressure and HUD Color Picker — Tune how your tablet's pressure responds, and the on-canvas color picker (Shift+Alt+right-drag with a painting tool).
• Recent files limit — How many entries appear under File > Open Recent.
• Language — Set the interface language.

Performance

• Undo history — How much memory undo may use: scale it with your RAM, or set a fixed size. If you work on very large files (e.g., 16-bit TIFFs from medium-format cameras), allocating more memory here gives you more undo headroom.
• Tile cache size — Memory budget for cached canvas tiles. Bumping this up helps when panning and zooming large documents.
• GPU Acceleration — Turn GPU acceleration of filters on or off, and pick which graphics device to use. On dual-GPU laptops, this lets you choose the dedicated GPU when you need the extra throughput. Takes effect after a restart.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Remap any tool or color shortcut — including the tools that have no key by default. Search by name, assign a new shortcut, or reassign an existing one — conflicts are flagged in red so you never create a collision by accident. The menu shortcuts are listed too, for reference.

If you're coming in with years of muscle memory from another layout, you can remap the tools to match.

Guides, Grid & Slices

The color of slice lines and whether slices show their numbers — useful when you cut web designs into pieces with the Slice tool.

PSD

Options that control how Fog Panther writes PSD files: Maximize compatibility (a flattened preview other apps can read), whether text layers stay editable or are rasterized, whether the fonts you used are included, and whether to save a single PSD or a zip with its fonts. Defaults are usually fine; touch these only if you're handing off to a pipeline that expects a specific PSD flavor.

Text

Font rendering controls — the hinting strength (None, Slight, Medium, or Full). If text looks blurry or over-sharpened on your particular display, this is where you tune it.

Common Workflows

The sections above cover individual features in detail. Here, we tie them together into complete walkthroughs that show you how to accomplish real tasks from start to finish. Each workflow includes cross-links to the relevant reference sections so you can dive deeper on any step.

Retouching a Portrait from Start to Finish

This walkthrough takes a portrait from a raw camera file to a polished, print-ready result using non-destructive techniques throughout.

1. Open the RAW file and set the initial tone. Open your portrait with Ctrl+O; the RAW file opens as a full-resolution image. Use Filter > Photo Editor to set the white balance, exposure, and highlights for a good baseline. Then go to Image > Adjustments > Levels and set your black and white points, then use Curves to add a gentle S-curve for contrast (see Filters & Adjustments).
2. Heal blemishes with the Healing Brush. Press J to activate the Healing Brush. Zoom in to 100% with Ctrl+Alt+0, then Alt+click on a clean area of skin to set your source. Paint over spots, scars, and stray hairs — the Healing Brush matches texture, lighting, and color automatically (see Tools).
3. Smooth skin with frequency separation. Duplicate the background layer twice (Ctrl+J twice). Name the lower copy "Low Frequency" and the upper copy "High Frequency." On the Low Frequency layer, apply Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur with a radius of 4–8 px (enough to smooth skin texture). On the High Frequency layer, set the blend mode to Linear Light, then go to Image > Apply Image, select the Low Frequency layer, set blending to Subtract with Scale 2 and Offset 128. Now you can paint on the Low Frequency layer with a soft brush to even out skin tones without losing pore detail (see Layers and Filters & Adjustments).
4. Non-destructive dodge & burn. Create a new layer, fill it with 50% gray (Edit > Fill > 50% Gray), and set its blend mode to Soft Light. Paint with a soft white brush at 5–10% opacity to brighten highlights (dodge) and a soft black brush to deepen shadows (burn). This sculpts the face with light without touching the original pixels (see Layers).
5. Color grade with Curves. Add a Curves adjustment layer with Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Curves. For a popular teal-and-orange look: lift the shadows in the Blue channel (adds blue/teal to shadows) and lower the highlights in the Blue channel (pushes highlights toward yellow/orange). Fine-tune the Red and Green channels to taste (see Filters & Adjustments).
6. Sharpen for output. Stamp all visible layers into a new layer with Ctrl+Alt+Shift+E. Apply Filter > Sharpen > High Pass with a radius of 1–2 px, then set the layer blend mode to Overlay. This adds crisp edge sharpening without halos (see Filters & Adjustments).
7. Export. For the web, use File > Export As and choose JPEG at 80% quality, resized to 2048 px on the long edge. For print, use Save As > As a Copy to write a 16-bit TIFF at full resolution, with the color profile embedded (see File Formats and Color Management).

Preparing Artwork for Print

This walkthrough covers creating a print-ready document from scratch, with proper margins, color management, and export settings.

1. Create a new document at the correct size. Press Ctrl+N and choose a Print preset (e.g., A4) or enter custom dimensions. Set the resolution to 300 DPI and the color mode to RGB Color for most digital presses, or CMYK Color if your printer requires it. Choose a white background (see Getting Started).
2. Set up guides for margins, bleed, and safe area. Go to View > New Guide Layout and add guides at your printer's bleed distance (typically 3 mm) from each edge. Add a second set of guides 10–15 mm inside for the safe area where all important content should stay. These guides are non-printing and ensure nothing gets clipped during trimming (see View & Navigation).
3. Design with layers and text. Build your composition using separate layers for background, imagery, and text. Use the Text tool (T) for live type — you can change fonts, sizes, and colors at any time without rasterizing. Add adjustment layers for global color corrections so you can tweak them non-destructively (see Layers and Text & Typography).
4. Assign an ICC color profile and soft-proof. Go to Edit > Assign Profile and select the ICC profile provided by your print shop (e.g., Fogra39 for European coated paper). Then choose the press profile in View > Proof Setup and turn on View > Proof Colors (Ctrl+Y) to simulate how the final print will look on screen (see Color Management).
5. Check for out-of-gamut colors. While soft-proofing, enable View > Gamut Warning (Ctrl+Shift+Y). Areas highlighted in bright green contain colors that fall outside the printer's reproducible range. Adjust these areas by desaturating slightly or shifting the hue until the warnings disappear (see Color Management).
6. Save a 16-bit TIFF with the embedded profile. Switch to Image > Mode > 16 Bits/Channel, then use File > Save As > As a Copy and choose TIFF; the profile is embedded automatically. This preserves maximum color fidelity and gives the print shop the profile they need to produce accurate color (see File Formats).
7. Save the master file. Press Ctrl+S to save your working document as a .fog file. This preserves all layers, masks, adjustment layers, and text as editable objects so you can return and make changes later (see File Formats).

Cutting Out a Product for E-Commerce

This walkthrough shows how to isolate a product from its background and export it for an online store listing with both transparent and white-background variants.

1. Open the product photo. Press Ctrl+O and open the photograph of the product. For the cleanest results, start with a well-lit photo shot against a plain background.
2. Select the background with the Magic Wand. Press W to activate the Magic Wand tool. Click on the background area — the tool selects a contiguous region of similar color. If the background has slight color variation, hold Shift and click on the unselected areas to add them to the selection. Adjust the Tolerance in the options bar (try 20–40) until the background is fully selected. For a busy background, the Background Remove tool can do this and the next three steps for you (see Selections).
3. Invert the selection to select the product. Press Ctrl+Shift+I to invert. Now the product itself is selected instead of the background (see Selections).
4. Feather the edge for a natural transition. Press Shift+F6 to open the Feather dialog. Enter a radius of 1–2 px. This softens the selection edge just enough to avoid a harsh, cut-out look without making the edges blurry (see Selections).
5. Copy the product to a new layer. Press Ctrl+J to copy the selection to a new layer. You now have the isolated product on its own layer with a transparent background. Hide or delete the original background layer (see Layers).
6. Refine edges with Quick Mask mode. Press Q to enter Quick Mask mode. The mask appears as a red overlay: red areas are outside the selection, clear areas are inside. Use a small, soft brush to paint black (it shows as red) over any background fringe that was included, or paint white to recover any product edges that were clipped. Press Q again to exit Quick Mask and return to a selection (see Selections and Tools).
7. Add a clean background. For a transparent background, you're done — the product sits on its own layer with nothing behind it. For a white background, create a new layer below the product and fill it with white (Edit > Fill > White).
8. Export for the store listing. For listings that support transparency, use File > Export As and choose PNG. For marketplaces that require a white background, hide the transparent layer, show the white-background layer, and export as JPEG at 90% quality. Many stores require specific dimensions (e.g., 2000×2000 px) — use Image > Canvas Size to pad the image to a square before exporting (see File Formats).

Isolating a Subject with Channels (Hair, Fur & Fine Edges)

Automatic selection tools work well for clean, hard edges — but they struggle with wispy hair, animal fur, tree branches against sky, or anything with semi-transparent, irregular boundaries. The channel-based selection technique exploits the natural contrast already present in your image's color channels to build a precise mask that captures even the finest details.

Why channels work where other tools don't

Every image is made of Red, Green, and Blue channels. Each channel is a grayscale representation of how much of that color is present at every pixel — bright areas contain more of the color, dark areas contain less. In many photos, one channel already shows strong contrast between the subject and the background. By duplicating that channel and pushing it toward pure black and white, you create a ready-made selection mask that follows every strand and whisker.

Common challenges

• Color fringing — remnants of the original background color clinging to fine edges, especially visible when the subject is placed on a new background.
• Semi-transparent areas — flyaway hairs or translucent fur that aren't fully opaque. These need to be preserved as partial transparency, not forced to solid.
• Mid-tone edges — areas where the subject and background have similar brightness in all channels, making it hard to push to pure black or white without destroying detail.
• "Frying" edges — over-applying Levels or Curves to the channel, which burns out delicate mid-tone transitions and creates harsh, jagged edges.

Step-by-step walkthrough

1. Open the image and examine each channel. Open your photo with Ctrl+O. Open the Channels panel from Panels > Channels. Click on the Red, Green, and Blue channels one at a time. Each appears as a grayscale image. Look for the channel where the subject is darkest and the background is lightest (or vice versa) — maximum contrast is what you want. For portraits with hair against a light background, the Blue channel is often the best choice because skin and hair contain little blue light, making them appear dark against a bright sky or studio backdrop.
2. Duplicate the best channel. Right-click the channel with the most contrast and choose Duplicate Channel. This creates an alpha channel copy that you can edit freely without affecting the image's color (see Color Management).
3. Push the contrast with Levels. With the duplicated channel selected, open Levels (Ctrl+L). Drag the black-point slider to the right to deepen the darks, and the white-point slider to the left to blow out the lights. The goal is to push the subject toward pure black and the background toward pure white (or the reverse). Go gradually — pulling the sliders too far in one pass will fry the delicate edges where hair fades into the background. Make two or three moderate passes rather than one aggressive one (see Filters & Adjustments).
4. Refine with Dodge and Burn. Select the Dodge/Burn tool (O), switch its mode to Burn with the Range set to Shadows and Exposure around 30–60%, and paint over background areas that are still gray to push them toward black. Then switch the mode to Dodge, set the Range to Highlights, and paint over the subject's interior to push it toward white. Working in Shadows/Highlights ranges protects the mid-tone edges from being destroyed (see Tools).
5. Paint the solid interior with a hard brush. Switch to the Brush tool (B). Use a hard, white brush to paint the clearly interior areas of the subject (torso, face, solid regions) pure white. Use a hard, black brush to paint obvious background areas pure black. Stay away from the fine edges — let the channel's natural tonal transitions handle those. This step is fast and cleans up the large areas that Dodge/Burn would take too long to handle.
6. Use the Overlay brush for tricky edges. Set the Brush tool's blend mode to Overlay in the options bar. In Overlay mode, painting white only affects pixels that are already lighter than 50% gray, and painting black only affects pixels darker than 50% gray — mid-tones are protected. This lets you confidently paint near the hair without destroying the fine semi-transparent strands. Paint white over the subject-side edges and black over the background-side edges (see Tools).
7. Load the channel as a selection. Hold Ctrl and click the thumbnail of your refined channel in the Channels panel. This loads the white areas as a selection (marching ants). If the subject is white in your channel, the selection already targets it. If the subject is black, invert the selection with Ctrl+Shift+I (see Selections).
8. Apply as a layer mask. Switch back to the Layers panel. Click the Add Layer Mask button at the bottom of the panel. The selection becomes a mask — the subject remains visible and the background disappears, with hair and fur edges fading naturally through partial transparency (see Layers).
9. Remove color fringing. Place a solid color layer behind the subject to check the edges against a contrasting background. If you see a halo of the original background color around the hair, create a new layer above the subject, set it to Color blend mode, then sample the subject's natural hair or fur color with the Eyedropper (I) and paint over the fringe. The Color blend mode replaces only the hue and saturation, leaving luminosity intact — so the fringe takes on the correct color without losing its transparency (see Layers).
10. Final cleanup and export. Zoom in to 200% and inspect the edges. Use a small, soft brush on the layer mask to paint black over any remaining artifacts or white to recover any lost detail. When you're satisfied, flatten or export as needed — PNG for transparency, or place the subject on a new background and export as JPEG (see File Formats).

Tips for best results

• Try multiple channels. Sometimes combining two channels (e.g., using Image > Calculations to blend the Blue and Green channels into a new channel) gives better separation than any single channel alone.
• Use Curves instead of Levels for more precise control over which tonal range gets pushed. You can pin the mid-tones in place while aggressively darkening shadows or brightening highlights.
• Check against several backgrounds. Toggle between a white, black, and colored background behind the masked subject — fringing and artifacts that are invisible on one color often appear on another.
• Don't force transparency to solid. Hair and fur edges are naturally semi-transparent. Let the mask preserve those gray values rather than pushing everything to pure black or white.