Adobe’s working on some new selection and masking tools for the next version of Photoshop. Ever since the Extract filter was removed in Photoshop CS4, Adobe has had plans to bring its various parts back as built-in tools. The first part of that is a new selection tool that’s already being demoed over at John Nack’s Adobe blog. The future of selection in Photoshop looks pretty bright, because this tool grabs edges really accurately.

In the demo, the new tools makes a great-looking mask from a low-res photo of a cat and a baby. There’s tons of detail, but the tool differentiates between hard and soft edges. They even manage to grab a cat whisker with a little extra brushing. Nice! With all the heat Adobe’s taking over Flash video right now, it’s easy to forget the really impressive tools they’ve built for the Creative Suite apps, and it looks like they’re only getting better.

Check out the demo video at high resolution on Facebook.