Product overview: onOne Software's Mask Pro 4.1 is included with their Plug-In Suite 5, or can be purchased on its own as a separate plug-in. From the description on the box: "Mask Pro makes it easy to create masks, selections and clipping paths on difficult subjects like hair, glass and fog in real-time by assigning keep and drop colors and simply painting away the background." Plugs 'N Pixels takes a hands-on look at Mask Pro and reports the results below.
		Masking (isolating the subject of an image with the intention of transferring it to another background) is perhaps the most common task in digital imaging, but also the most difficult and least fun. In times past one would reach for the Lasso tool in Photoshop and start dragging away, laboriously working around the edges of the subject until the whole thing was selected. The result was usually a wild and jaggy selection that looked like it was done with a razor blade. And forget selecting soft-edged or transparent objects this way! onOne's Mask Pro 4.1 addresses this situation with 12 tools to help speed up the selection process while at the same time improving the quality of the results, regardless of the subject matter. Before you get started, you'll want to prep you image so you'll get the best results. Perform any needed color-correction and unlock (or duplicate) your Background layer so Mask Pro can reveal what is underneath. The screenshot above shows Mask Pro's interface and demonstrates one of a few approaches it offers for separating the foreground and background from each other. You can choose from among various approaches to isolating your subject, including Fask Masking (best suited for subjects with well-defined edges), Detailed Masking (which offers a Pen tool for adding clean Bezier curves to the selection), masking transparent and semi-transparent objects and creating selections for later treatment back in Photoshop. My approach for the flower examples shown here was to use the basic Keep and Drop eyedroppers found at the top of the Toolbox (see Toolbox screenshot at lower right). I clicked around the flowers and told Mask Pro which colors I wanted to retain and those I wanted to lose. You'll notice the Keep colors are those found in the flowers while the Drop colors are those found in the background. My selected colors become part of the defined color sets, which can be viewed by opening the Keep/Drop Detail Palette (new in version 4). An alternate and less precise approach to the eyedropper method is to use the Keep and Drop highlighters. The highlighters let you quickly and freely draw red and green stripes or any shape (including little dots as needed for tight spots) across large sections of the image. After designating your Keep and Drop colors using either of the above methods (or even a combination of the two), the next step is to use the Magic Brush to literally wipe away the unwanted colors, leaving behind your subject surrounded by transparency (as seen above). (A companion tool, the basic Brush, ignores all colors and just erases or restores large swatches of pixels that don't need extra attention.) Save the results out of Mask Pro, and back in Photoshop, experiment with slipping other images behind your isolated subject to create a brand new composite. A few of my before-and-after results are shown at right. You'll find these type of extractions are easy to do with sharp-edged objects, but while Mask Pro is fully capable of isolating transparent objects (such as the water glasses at right, bubbles, smoke, etc.), you'll need to do a little more work. That's where Mask Pro's additional tools come in handy. Besides the Eyedroppers, Markers and Brushes, Mask Pro provides additional tools dedicated to more specific masking and mask manipulation tasks: The Magic Fill and Bucket Fill tools deal with cleanup of the removed background area where stray pixels are left behind. The Magic Wand compliments the Magic Brush and is perfect for selecting large areas of similar color. The Airbrush tool is used in Erase or Restore mode to soften mask edges for more natural transitions, while the Chisel is a hard-edged approach to mask edge editing. The Blur tool operates as you would expect, blurring the edge of the mask by averaging the pixels of the mask edge and background. For the hardy among us, Mask Pro also offers Pen tools for either automatically or manually tracing clean subject edges. The onOne Extension palette (accessible from within Photoshop via the Window menu) is also shown at lower right and is a great way to speed up access to Mask Pro as well as other onOne products. Mask Pro is supported in Mac OS-X 10.5 or 6 (on G5 or Intel hardware), and Windows XP through 7 (on Pentium 4 or better hardware). Wacom tablet users have even more control over Mask Pro's sensitivity settings and precision editing.
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