The Automatic Halo Fix in Photoshop, Tested on Real Hair

Photoshop's beta 27.11 introduces Enhance Edge, an AI feature that promises to erase the halos that show up when you drop a masked subject onto a contrasting background. Hair cutouts have frustrated retouchers for decades, and any tool that claims to solve them deserves a hard look before you trust it on real work.

Unmesh Dinda walks through exactly how the feature behaves, and his testing clears up a common misunderstanding right away. Enhance Edge does not improve your mask. It keeps the mask identical and generates new edge detail on the inside, expanding the hair strands so the bright fringe from the original background disappears. Dinda demonstrates this by holding Alt and comparing the mask on the new layer against the old one, and they match pixel for pixel. The tool fills in the edges rather than reselecting them, which is why he argues the name itself is misleading.

The credits question gets a straight answer. Dinda checks his balance before running the tool, sees 1,890 credits, then runs Enhance Edge and lands at 1,870. That's 20 credits per use. He's clear that Adobe hasn't finalized pricing for the release version, and whether it costs credits at all may depend on your plan. Cloud-based AI carries a real compute cost, so a charge of some kind is likely. If you'd rather skip credits entirely, he points to the built-in alternative: select and mask, then check Decontaminate Colors in the output settings. It produces a flatter, sharper result with less texture, but it costs nothing and still expands the edge onto a new layer with the same mask.

The most useful part of the video is the failure case. Enhance Edge generates the entire edge at once, and AI has a resolution ceiling. On a high-resolution portrait with fine, separated strands, Dinda shows the tool turning crisp detail into mush. The before-and-after is stark. For those images, he reaches for a traditional fix instead: select the mask, run Filter, Other, Minimum, and nudge the radius up to push the edge inward and cut the halo. That old technique holds detail the AI destroys, which is his case for still learning the fundamentals.

Enhance Edge fits a specific slice of the workflow, and knowing that slice saves credits and grief. It shines on moderate-resolution images with messy, contrasty backgrounds where a clean fringe was nearly impossible before, and it holds up whether the new background is black, white, or gray. The pattern here echoes a wider shift across Adobe's tools, where generative features handle the broad, forgiving cases while manual methods stay sharper on high-stakes detail. Dinda even finds an off-label use worth stealing: run Enhance Edge on a subject to thicken thin hair, since the tool fills in the outer strands while leaving the background untouched. Volume boosting was never the intended purpose, but it works, and it costs the same 20 credits as the halo fix. Treat the AI as a first pass on manageable files and keep Minimum, Decontaminate Colors, and select and mask ready for anything with delicate strands at full resolution.

Watch the full breakdown above to see Dinda's side-by-side tests and the exact settings that keep hair detail intact.