beebibi wrote:
Do you know of any good third party plug-ins for difficult masks which will work in CS6 - I am not that thrilled with the 'Refine Mask'.
Thanks
Best, Bee
Fluid Mask requires some learning curve but the results are so far the best among all plugins if you hate working with alpha channels in the first place.
Yes, channels with threshold works with some images but for the more intricate clean cutouts I find it lacking.
I looked at your other suggestions:
OnOne Perfect Mask seems to be more global and some of the examples lack accuracy for my needs...
Fluid Mask 3 might be for me - the tutorials are fun and I will download the trial version. (many years ago I used KnockOut from Corel and this seems to have a similar approach)
Yes, channels with threshold works with some images but for the more intricate clean cutouts I find it lacking.
I looked at your other suggestions:
OnOne Perfect Mask seems to be more global and some of the examples lack accuracy for my needs...
Fluid Mask 3 might be for me - the tutorials are fun and I will download the trial version. (many years ago I used KnockOut from Corel and this seems to have a similar approach)
Luminosity masks, and the Calculations and Apply Image commands used in conjunction with Blend Modes are far more accurate than third-party masking plug-ins. As Deke McClelland says, these functions allow the image to select itself. And third-party plug-ins all have learning curves and their own idiosyncratic behavior; some, for example, can't create masks on a background layer.
Thanks, guys ....I downloaded also the Topaz ReMask and tried it out - yes, it's good value for money but does not reach the accuracy you can get from the Fluid Mask in my opinion - I tried also the trial version here - unfortunately it does not have a PlugIn for CS6 yet , you have to import/export manually. I was assured that the Vertus team is working on a solution for this right now.
James, I took your advice and looked into Linda's online tutorials and promptly got hooked - there is a lot to learn there apart from selection techniques. I like the Deke McCLlelland videos and that will, I am sure (as you put it so nicely) add to my knowledge base on masking
The best of all time was of course, Ultimatte Knockout, but Corel did a damned good job of ruining that. There was a learning curve but you could mask smoke if you wanted. ReMask seems to operate on a similar set of assumptions and I've been using it quite successfully for a couple of years now. There is a learning curve and some of the special tricks from Knockout still apply to make Re-Mask even better than it is out of the box. It does work as a plugin for Photoshop and I think they have a 30 day trial as well. To the person who ripped it for not working on a background layer, there's a good reason that you don't want to do that. You want to configure Re-Mask to automatically dupe the layer you're working on and apply the selection it makes to a layer mask. That way you can refine it after the fact on that new layer in Ps and, more importantly, dupe the masked layer, apply the layer mask, dupe it again and then use the layer matting features as needed (and you dupe so you can mask THAT as well) to perfect your mask.
There are still a bunch of features I have yet to tackle in Re-Mask but overall it works pretty darned well and works on very high res images very well.
