Why Plug-Ins
Why Plug-Ins: Masking in Photoshop
Extracting objects. Isolating objects. Cut out an image. Remove background. These are all terms commonly used to refer to what is known as masking. Essentially, masking in Photoshop comes down to hiding or removing an unwanted object or area in a digital image. You see masked images everyday from product shots in a catalog or online web store to people and celebreties in magazines. But how do you mask something in Photoshop?
Like anything else in Photoshop, there are several ways to do this. Depending on what it is you are trying to mask, some methods are easier than others. If you have a high contrast and a good edge between your foreground and background subjects, you might use the Extract command in Photoshop. For more complex masks that involve masking hair or transparency, you might try masking via Photoshop Channels or the Image Calculations command combined with some other selection techniques.
As we have said before, you can do anything in Photoshop, including masking. The problem is that the Extract tool, while it can be useful and quick at times, doesn't give you a good preview of your results and not a lot of options for fine tuning your mask. Masking via Channels requires to you to have a pretty good working knowledge of Photoshop in order to make it work right and it can take several steps to accomplish (which is fine if you have the time to do so). There is even a new Quick Select tool in Photoshop CS3 that is pretty good and fast, but has it's limitations (masking transparency and fine detail like hair for example).
From masking jobs that are relatively easy to those that are complex, many users find themselves turning to a plug-in such as Mask Pro. As a Photoshop plugin, Mask Pro allows you to simply pick and choose colors you want to keep and colors you want to drop. You get the option to create a transparent mask by removing only some color out of a pixel which is extremely useful on the edge of an object so that you don't get any "edge halos" which will be a dead give away that your new composite is fake.
With Mask Pro, you get a real-time preview of the mask you are creating so you know exactly how it will look. You even get a composite view so you can see a background layer show up as you mask away the unwanted background. Mask Pro comes complete with a wide range tools that allow you to touch up edges, expand or contract a selection and most importantly, save you time so you can get back behind the camera.