New member: Best way to select the borders of face?

[Kroy]

Hello everybody, I've just joined!

What is the best way to select round the borders of a face?

I've been teaching myself to do this using the magic wand, but it's quite time consuming - lots of undoing, trying different tolerance settings, zooming in/out, using polygonal lasso to 'add to selection' the deselected areas etc

Because the hair is dark and the skin is light it seems like quite a long process?

So I'm wondering if this is the best way, and how the pros do it? eg Would they just manually draw round the edges?

[Digital Hero]

There is no simple solution as all images have there own challenges.

Personally I always use a mask and use channels (or duplicated and manipulated channels) to make selections from the hair and other fiddly bits.

I always find using any "auto" technique requires as much time fine tuning and cleaning up as it would to do it manually in the first place.