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Review: onOne's Mask Pro 4.1
by Christopher Swift | March 12, 2010
OnOne's latest update to it's Photoshop and Elements masking software is Mask Pro 4.1. We've used other masking software, but find this to be the best. As with all masking software, the less contrast of the edge of what you want selected makes it harder to mask.
Mask Pro 4.1 contains an extremely wide array of tools and sliders to make not only sweeping changes, but also give you the ability to fine tune the edge to a very great measure.
Not only do we love this product (and have used it for years), we also offer excellent discounts. Get 15% off when you visit the onOne site and use our exclusive discount coupon code: PHTPR.
Summary
Mask Pro is onOne's plugin for Photoshop which allows you to make fine selections in images and place them in another photo. Mask Pro 4.1 offers a wide array of tools to make and tweak these options and overall does an excellent job of it. The interface is quite easy to use and although there's a learning curve to get comfortable with the tools, most of them work just as they do in Photoshop. Having said that, it's an intuitive application to use and it's quite powerful at making good selections quickly.
Requirements: Windows XP SP2 or Vista or Mac OS X 10.4.8 or later, Photoshop CS2 or later, or Photoshop Elements 4 or later. You'll also need at least 512MB of RAM and 60 MB of hard-disk space. Installation is very quick, easy to do, and completely automatic.
Features: 5/5 | Ease of Use: 4.5/5 | Value: 4.5/5
Here are the two images we'll be using. The Background image needs to be the one which will be revealed under your selection. We've dragged down the Opacity of Layer 1, Mom and the kids in the pool, and pulled down the Layer 1 image to place them better in the "new" pool.
Open your image in Photoshop and select Mask Pro 4.1 from the onOne drop-down menu in the menu bar at the top.
The interface you'll now be presented with, see above, is very simple, but also contains a lot of powerful tools.
The tools (left in the image, above) all work extremely well and work almost identically to what you'd find in Photoshop. This review is not meant to be a tutorial, but we thought a quick breakdown of the tools with some tips might be helpful. We go top to bottom, left to right.
- Keep Colors (green eyedropper): Click all the colors of your subject we want to keep. Can be as fine as 1 pixel at a time. You only need to click around the edges of your subject.
- Drop Colors (red eyedropper): Identical to the above only the color you click will be removed later, revealing the underlying image.
- Keep Highlighter: This is for selecting larger areas. Be careful not to go over the border into your "drop" colors.
- Drop Highlighter: Same as above only don't go into your "keep" colors.
- Magic Brush: After you've selected your "drop" and "keep" colors, use this brush away those to be dropped, revealing the underlying image. It's an extremely useful part of your options here in that you have two pair of sliders: edge/size and transition/threshold. You also have a checkbox for "color decontamination" — definitely have this box checked; your selection edges will turn out much better.
- Brush: Another extremely useful option. Use this to erase or restore pixels; it ignores the "keep" or "drop" colors. A necessary tool to have.
- Magic Fill: Use this tool in "cleanup" view (one of the six icons on the bottom of your image window. This is, again, a very useful tool in finding (and erasing or restoring) those stray pixels you might have missed. You have an additional option of a slider to control how large or small an area to fill.
- Bucket Fill: Here's another excellent little tool. Use this also in "cleanup" view to erase or restore all pixels contiguous with the one your click. I don't use this tool much but it has been quite handy from time to time.
- Magic Wand: This is the equivalent of painting over the entire image with the Magic Brush. Works like that in Photoshop only better — it maintains transparency on the edges. Be careful with this tool: it works best on images with simple backgrounds and high contrast between the "keep" and "drop" colors. If your "keeps" and "drops" are relatively close to each other, don't use this tool.
- Airbrush: Most excellent way to get the perfect tweaking of the edge of your selection. You get control over the intensity of your brush stroke to fine tune the transparent edges — in either erase or restore mode.
- Chisel: Yet another tool for perfecting your edge. This is used only for edge pixels in either erase or restore mode. You have sliders to fine tune the control even more and by clicking and dragging on the edge, you either choke or expand the selection. Very nice!
- Blur: This creates a blend between the hard edge of the mask and the background — this applies only to the mask, not the image.
- Magic Pen: Works identically to Photoshop's magnetic pen tool. As with the Photoshop tool, the higher the contrast on the edge, the better it works. This tool (and the next) are very useful for masking out large areas in one go.
- Pen: Just like in Photoshop — straight lines and Bezier curves. Very fun to use and, yet again, a very nice tool in the box to use. If you don't know how to use the Pen Tool in Photoshop, take some time to play with it; it's really fantastic in making certain kinds of paths/selections.
Here we've made a large path with the Pen tool and by clicking once inside the path, all those pixels are removed.
We're really more than half way done here. The traditionally trickiest parts — the hair — have been done. And Mask Pro does an excellent job with hair. Obviously, the higher the contrast between background and hair, the better it'll work. But even at that, Mask Pro 4.1 does an excellent job with even less contrast.
Here's the final product and we can see that it'll still need some tweaking. One of the problems here is that the lighting in the two images was not the same and we'll need to do something like Blur, Curves, Levels on the selection back in Photoshop.
At the end of the day, onOne's Mask Pro 4.1 is a winner. We've tried other masking software and feel that Mask Pro comes out on top.
Another strong point of Mask Pro 4.1 is the job it does with semi-transparent content. The fact of the matter is that it does an excellent job. The legs in the image had a transparent element to them and we were very impressed with how they transferred over to the background image totally believably.
We haven't mentioned many of the other options of Mask Pro, but you have numerous viewing options (cleanup, original, single layer, mask, and composite views), or the extra slider control you get with most tools. Adding it all up, you get a pretty big toolbox giving you a lot of power over your masking.
Conclusion
All your options, tools, and levels of control over those tools make Mask Pro 4.1 a pleasure to use — it's easy to learn, fun, and does a truly excellent job. It also comes highly recommended by us at photoshop-pro.com.
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onOne Software makes award-winning Adobe Photoshop plugins that maximize the power of Photoshop and make the most common and challenging tasks easier, faster and better. Their Photoshop plug-ins will help you with color correction, resizing, masking, creating photographic effects and more.
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As a short preview of this extraction tool (taken from their site), you might know that Fluid Mask is a highly advanced software tool designed to make life easier for everyone who creates cut outs. Built as a plug-in to Adobe Photoshop, Fluid Mask is the new next-generation cut-out tool. Behind the product is breakthrough technology that mimics the way the eye, optic-nerve and brain perform visual processing. It offers an intuitive, accurate and fast approach to cut outs. A key feature is the new Edge Overlay showing object edges within an image. Suddenly masking become a whole lot easier - it's now possible to select, group and mask objects in images to make great cut outs.
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