Pick with Smart Select

Smart Select makes a mask from your clicks. Use it when you want one particular thing, such as one person in a group or a single rock, that Subject or Select would not pick on its own.

Select an object

1. Click the AI button next to Layer in the Layers pane and choose Smart Select from its arrow list. To add it to an existing layer, right-click the layer, choose Add Mask (or Add), then Smart Select.
2. Wait for “Preparing Smart Select…” to clear. The bar across the photo then lists the controls.
3. Click the thing you want. A green preview covers what DarkRay thinks you mean. A green dot marks your click.
4. Refine the preview with more clicks, a box, or exclusions (below).
5. Press Enter to accept, or Esc to cancel.

To	Do this
Add to the selection	Click
Select a region more precisely	Drag a box around it
Exclude an area	Alt-click empty space. A red dot marks it
Remove a point you placed	Alt-click that dot
Remove the last point	Backspace
Accept the mask	Enter
Cancel	Esc

Right-click does nothing in Smart Select. These keys are fixed and can’t be remapped.

When you accept, the mask lands at once with a rough edge, then DarkRay refines the edge in the background and swaps the better version in. The status bar shows that work and lets you cancel it.

Tip

Draw a box first when the object is small. DarkRay zooms into the box and works at much higher detail, so later clicks inside it are more exact.

What to expect

• Smart Select works on the cropped view you see. Changing the crop, including from the Framing section, ends the session, as does deleting its layer. Start again afterward.
• Very narrow gaps, such as the space between a person’s legs, may not open up however many exclusion points you add. Add a painted mask with Subtract to cut them out.
• A Smart Select mask doesn’t keep your clicks. If its saved result goes missing, its row reads “redo” and you delete it and select again. The other AI masks can be regenerated; see Mask with AI.
• Smart Select has Strength and the Add, Subtract and Intersect choices like any mask, but no Expand or Feather.

Technical details: how Smart Select works

Smart Select uses SAM 2.1, a model that turns clicks and boxes into a mask. When you start, it encodes the cropped view you see once. Each click or box then runs only the quick part of the model, which is why the preview updates as you click. A drawn box encodes its own full-resolution window so that later clicks decode at up to the photo’s native resolution.

On accept, the rough mask is added immediately. A background job then re-encodes a crop around the object and refines the edge with a matting model at native resolution. If the refined mask disagrees badly with the rough one (less than half overlap), DarkRay discards it and keeps the rough mask.

The finished mask is saved as an image and, like the other AI masks, follows lens changes.