Most Photoshop users build up their own libraries of images that they’ve photographed. If they’re objects, then it makes sense to save them with a clipping path, so that they can be easily lifted from their background at a later date.

The trouble is that when objects are saved as cutout images, with no background, the act of turning a clipping path into a selection will, because of the anti-aliasing process involved, include a thin white border from outside the object within the selection.

This is not a difficult problem to deal with. But wouldn’t it be better if the problem didn’t arise in the first place? Here’s a simple solution that can save a lot of time later.

Hot tip: If you’re still using dialogs to turn paths into selections, you’re causing yourself extra work. Instead, click on the path name in the Paths panel, then press Control/Command-Enter. The selection will be made for you. Better still, write a Photoshop Action to do the whole job with a keystroke.

Here’s a typical situation: a photograph of a statue in a dark corner of a museum. The statue’s a fine piece of work, but all that background clutter is too distracting. It will have to go. (You can download the sculpture.zip archive and open the sculpture.psd image shown here, if you want to use it for this tutorial.)

Drawing a path around fiddly objects like this is a tricky business, and it’s not the sort of thing you’d want to do more than once. So we’ll save the path we’ve drawn, to be retrieved later.

Here’s the standard procedure: make the path into a selection, inverse that selection and then press Delete to fill the outside with white. (I’ve assumed we’re still working on the background layer.)

As with all cutout images, this one is saved as a JPEG to be worked on later. When we come back to it, we take that path and turn it into a selection, so that we can lift the statue from its white background.

This is a much better background: it makes the statue stand out, but its graphic nature doesn’t detract from the image. When we look closely, though, it doesn’t look right: is the outline as clean as we’d hoped?

When we zoom in we can see a white fringe around the whole statue. This is exactly what we don’t want: it makes the whole composition look ugly and unnatural.

The solution is to stop after the initial path is drawn. Rather than inversing and deleting straight away, turn the path into a selection and then expand that selection by one pixel.

Here’s how the expanded selection looks: there’s now a fringe of background image, one pixel wide, all the way around the perimeter of the statue.

Now, inverse the selection and delete to fill with white as before. Note that the path itself hasn’t changed—it’s now one pixel inside the object perimeter.

The difference is that when we now make that path into a selection and place it onto a different background, there’s no white edge. Problem solved!