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Fluid Mask Photoshop Plugin from www.vertustech.com
Software Required: Adobe Photoshop
Price: $199.00
Manufacturers Description:
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.
Key features of our approach are: Identify edges before you begin masking using the Edge Overlay view "Click-and-cut" - easily select object for quick masking Find hard to see edges using the intuitive Edge Detection options Fine tune mask selections at the pixel level using color palettes Work in progress is easy to review Masking and blending are co-synchronous - no double work Automatically differentiates between hard and soft edges in the blend
| | We took Fluid Mask for a test drive with a Flower Cut out.
 We wanted to see how fluid mask would handle this cut out of a daffodil to a black background. Our start image consists of a white daffodil, against a predominantely dark background, with our photographers hand behind one side of the flower head. This type of image would not normally be too difficult to cut out with photoshops native tools.
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 On loading the Fluid Mask plugin, the plugin does a quick scan of the image and analyzes its features. The resulting edges that it detects are then shown in the image editing window. We left Fluid Mask at it's default settings. On checking the edges it has found, the plugin has very neatly defined all the edges that we need to select the flower head. You can fine tune the edge detection settings if the results are not quite there, but on images like this the plugin has a very successful hit rate first time round.
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 The next step is to tell the plugin which parts of the image you want to keep. We used the 'keep local' brush to paint over the flower petals in a rough manner, which the plugin then further filled up to the defining edges at the edge of the flower head. Choosing 'autofill' from the image menu then filled in the rest of the delete mask leaving only our flower head selected.
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 Next up is to perform the actual cutout. You can perform test renders of smaller areas of your image to see how your mask is coming along. We opted for the 'create cut out' option in the main toolbar to see the resulting image, which is then displayed in the output tab of the plugin. A nice option here is to display the cutout against any colour background you like to see how the cut out has performed. We were more than happy with the resulting cut out and applied it and dropped back into photoshop. We have enlarged a portion of the image here, to show how well the plugin has removed the background colours from the masks edges and given them a very nice anti aliased finish.
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From opening the plugin to closing the plugin with a completed mask for this image took a fraction under 2 minutes! You would be hard pressed to get anywhere near that at all using photoshops native tools to do such a tidy job of this image cut out.
We have only scratched the surface of what this plugin is capable of, and the website has some nice examples of the plugin working on some images that you would normally give up on trying to cut out by hand. Hair and foliage are normally very difficult to mask out, but this plugin has the tools to help you achieve that with some ease.
We have to say that we Highly Recommend Fluid mask if your day to day work involves cutting out images as this plugin will save you stacks of time in editing.
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You can download a demo version of the plugin and view some nice video tutorials showing some of the clever features that Fluid Mask has to offer on the vertustech website.
About VertusTech:
New generation of software
We've created a whole new generation of photo imaging software that's more powerful than anything else currently available. We work closely with our parent company, Heligon, a multidisciplinary team of experimental psychologists, mathematicians and physicists based in the UK. They have developed a brand new technology that recognizes and manipulates complex shapes and colors within images, based upon the way the eye and brain perform visual processing. Automates manual processes
Our software automates photo manipulation processes that up until now have been manual. Not only does this make everything much, much faster, it also produces results far better than anything you can do by hand Needs-led products
Because we understand the needs of designers and graphic artists, our sole focus is to produce software that helps them create better results, faster.
See Vertustechs website for further information
www.vertustech.com
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