By: Erik Vlietinck
Sun, July 15, 2007 - 5:40:01

http://www.vertustech.com

Creating cut-outs for magazines or for the web is not an easy thing to do when the object you’re trying to cut out has hair or has details that interfere with a background (tree branches, for example). There are a number of cut-out help tools out there, that all make life a little easier, but if you want to get on with your life and not spend a whole afternoon making that mask perfect, you should give Fluid Mask 3 a try.

We’ve been following and covering Fluid Mask 3 since the two previous versions, and this is a Photoshop plug-in that has been improving ever since it came to market. With version 3, Fluid Mask’s developers, Vertus Technologies, have taken a step back in Mac OS X human interface compliance, but that doesn’t mean the program has become harder to use --quite the contrary, in fact. Much that you do when creating that cut-out, is automated in Fluid Mask’s workflow. And the results are nothing short of perfect. With Fluid Mask 3 you can create a perfect image object or cut-out in about a third of the time it takes with Photoshop or with competing products.

Photoshop Plug-in or Stand-alone

Fluid Mask 3 comes in two flavours: the traditional Photoshop plug-in and a stand-alone version. Both work the same way, but the stand-alone version is somewhat more picky about the image file formats you throw at it. It won’t open everything, and that’s a bit frustrating. But the photoshop plug-in obviously doesn’t have that problem. It will even work with 16-bit images.

The interface of version 3 reminded me of a Windows application, but it didn’t make things harder to use. Instead, a lot of the power that you still had to play with yourself in the previous versions in order to obtain good results, have now evolved to a state where you can sit back and watch Fluid Mask 3 do the work for you. This means that you can use the Auto-Fill Image command with simple images, and Fluid Mask will cough up a near-perfect cut-out.

Fluid Mask uses contrast and colour difference as a basis to work with. If there’s sufficient contrast between two colour areas, the application concludes all by its own, that it has found an edge. And edges are boundaries for applying a cut-out. In most cases, this works well, but when the contrast becomes too low --like when the colours at each side of an edge are so close even we humans can’t tell the difference easily anymore-- Fluid Mask 3 needs help.

You will have to set the edge detection system to different levels of intelligence, and in most cases you will need to isolate the difficult part of the image, so Fluid Mask can more easily detect the differences in contrast, hue, and luminance between the areas you’re trying to discern from each other.

The Color Workspace

Fluid Mask 3 has a number of tools to this purpose. The most powerful in my opinion, is the patch tool. This tool allows you to isolate an area and apply different “recognition” settings to the area. The patch tool works in tandem with the Color Workspace tool. The latter enables you to isolate colours and designate these as good, bad, or undecided. The Color Workspace reminded me of Mask Pro, but only for a very short while, as there really is no comparison possible.

For example, I used the Color Workspace on the Tall Ship’s image. By sampling the colours that I wanted to keep --and using my eyes to discern colours that were very close to each other in terms of luminance and hue-- I could quickly designate the areas with these colours as belonging to the Keep mask. Better still, whenever I hovered over the colours that I thought were for keepers in the Color Workspace, a bright yellow appeared in the photo so that I could actually evaluate whether these areas were what I wanted to keep after all.

If I would have been really interested in cutting out the Tall Ship from the photo, I would have used the patch tool in combination with the Color Workspace --in my test, I used the Color Workspace by itself-- to isolate small parts of the masts and ropes, so that Fluid Mask wouldn’t have to decide on the whole of the image’s masks.

As you will see from the special test image that I created, the full automatic mode isn’t absolutely perfect. The square corners --although there is plenty contrast between the colours there-- do not automatically fill up with a throw away mask, and where the dark blue bars create a white square hole, Fluid Mask 3 thinks I want to keep that as well.