Selecting images in KnockOut 2

KnockOut 2 is a production of Corel
subdivision Procreate. It can be used both as a separate program and a plug-in for Adobe Photoshop or Corel Draw.

Set Up

There’s nothing unusual or difficult in the setup of the program. In the end you should register it. Be sure that you are connected to the Internet. I chose to do the registration online and the only problem was that the page only loaded at the third time. If the registration is not successful, you will have the registration screen in your windows menu and can continue with it at any time.
If you are using the plug-in version, after the setup is finished and the registration complete, you will find Knock Out 2 in Filters menu of your Photo Editor.
To make a selection with KnockOut you should open your image in Adobe PhotoShop (or other Photo editor) and create a new layer. Then go to Filters, KnockOut, and open working layer. (If you haven’t created one, a message appears: File is wrong format. Possibly missing layers. Just press OK then and create a new layer).
The opening of a working layer brings you to a new screen – the KnockOut plugin (At the first time I was afraid that the program stopped working or some mistake happened: my Adobe PhotoShop disappeared from screen completely and for a few seconds nothing seemed to happen!).
The program has an Uninstall option and can be uninstalled without any problems. It only left out two folders containing background images but gave back their names and location so that I found and deleted them manually in no time. Apart from that, no traces of Knock Out could be found on the computer.

Interface

I found the interface quite friendly. What attracted most is the limited number of easily understandable tools. The main selecting tools: Inside Object and Outside Object, Inside Shadow and Outside Shadow come in pairs. Their functionality is quite clear. Every selecting tool has several modes of use shown on the upper horizontal panel in the usual and quite convenient Corel fashion.
When starting the selection you will usually draw a line inside or outside the object you want to select (whichever you find the easiest). KnockOut 2 tools do not allow to scroll the image, so you cannot work with a magnified picture and be precise from the very beginning. When I first realized that I was quite disappointed. Then I discovered the lovely polygonal mode (switched on by the checkbox on the modes menu) allowing drawing lines from point to point.

From that moment and on I most of the time used it for the first rough selection. This mode considerably fastens the selection process and I strongly recommend beginning with it.
After you made the rough inside or outside line you can magnify the image and start adding and/or subtracting in the freehand mode until the line goes alongside the edge as close as possible.

If your rough line is relatively smooth and is just far from the edge you can simply press a big plus sign on the upper panel and the selection will expand automatically (you can contract it as well, just press the minus). I also tried to roughly trace the border, then expand (with the inside selection) or subtract (with the outside selection) the selection, and after that worked out the remaining imperfect parts by adding and subtracting.

After the first selection is ready you can either draw the remaining one yourself (and you will have the same options of adding, subtracting, expanding and contracting) or use the convenience of the Automatic Inside/Outside Selection (depending on the tool you were working with). It automatically draws the second line alongside your contour. All you do afterwards – expand or subtract the selection and, if anything is not perfect, add or subtract from it. With both tools you can add a single pixel to the selection (can be useful when working with hair or transparent objects).
After the selection is made, there are two additional tools for improving the results of the cutout. The Feather tool will make the transition area (the area between the outside and inside lines) blurred so that it does not look rough and ragged. It is also a selecting tool. But with it you should select the area that you want to blur.

The Syringe tool allows bringing background color into the selected object. To tell the trough I didn’t quite realized how it works, or rather which result it brings (even after the manual).
Some objects have shadows that should be kept. KnockOut 2 has Shadow Selection tools for it. They work in the same manner as Inside and Outside Object tools.
When all the selections are brought to the satisfying level you may process the image (it’s in the edit menu or just press the button with two blue curved arrows shown on the right). There are four levels of detail at which the image can be processed. The difference between results can be considerable.

After the procession, you will see the resulted mask on a green (by default) background. You can change the background color or even load some picture as a background (there’s a set of them to choose from). These options are on the left with the other tools (a colored rectangle and a small picture with mountains).
The procession can be performed several times. You can change the outlines, add or subtract single pixels, use Feather or Syringe tools and process the image again and again. Syringe tool allows you to inject hair color in the transition area for precise location of color tones. Alternately the Feather tool allows the user to feather a transition area if the background tone is “leaking through”. The feather does not remove the background but sometimes is a faster way to correct than using precise freehand masking.
You also can go back to the original image or have a look at the resulted mask (View – Alpha).

After you exhausted the possibilities of selection tools (or your own patience as often happened to me), you can start retouching the knocked out image. There are two Touchup tools - Brush and Eraser -enabling you to work with the processed mask and improve it. The problems will arise, naturally at the edges. You will have patches of background at some places around the borders and there will be “holes” in the image or parts of it will be missing. Touchup Brush restores the foreground image and Eraser removes the extras.

When doing touch up you will have two windows – of the original image and of the mask so that you can see what part of the original picture you are trying to restore or remove.

When you apply the selection, it is saved and returned to the main program where you can apply it (Selections - Apply Selection). Then cut, copy, and paste it wherever you want.

The Knock Out 2 ads say that it lets you isolate and separate a detailed foreground object from an image, while preserving edge detail such as hair, transparences, blurred edges and shadows.
I tried to test all these types of selections for you.

Different types of images

KnockOut works best of all, of course, with contrasted images, where the edges are smooth and the foreground color is bright. To make a first try I took a picture of the rose.
With it, I used Inside and Outside Object tools only. First, I draw the line in a polygonal mode with the picture fit in view. Then I improved the line by adding to the selections.
Afterwards I worked with the Brush and the Eraser on the knocked out image. The selection you can see  on the left was made at the 3rd level of detail (set by default). When the level of detail was 4 (on the right) the touchup tools were hardly needed.
Another way to make things simpler is to make the contrast higher (by 20-30). Having made a mask on a high contrast image and at the 4th level of detail I got some very good results.
But when doing that you better create two layers and load selection to the one with the normal contrast. If you load it to the layer you worked with there will be problems with taking the contrast level back.

As you see I pasted the selections onto different backgrounds. This can be helpful when checking the quality of the selections. Some flaws won’t be seen on a transparent background and will stand out on a colored one. That’s why I think it useful to play with the background colors when the selection is processed. You would probably want to choose the one which is close to the picture you want to paste your masked image into.
But such an object as this rose is simple enough and can be selected with the usual magnetic lasso imbedded in Photoshop to almost the same effect. KnockOut 2 was created for more challenging tasks obviously.

Preserving hair

Preserving hair is a hard and challenging job for any selecting program. You need to know the tools well and be ready to spend a lot of time on a picture. And it is high time to look into the manual or use the tutorial.  Knock Out 2 has quite an adequate manual where you can find step by step instructions for selecting different types of images.
I make some presentations with animals to show to my children and wanted to put a picture of this baby manul  into one of them. But I didn’t like the background (the cage) so masking was needed.

Masking animals is tricky as they have fur that gives a very uneven edge to the image.
This time Inside and Outside tools were not enough. I had to spend considerable time working out the inside selection, especially in the whiskers area, though.
The algorithm was the same: I made a rough selection, then magnified the picture and refined it.

I worked out the whickers under high magnification and with a very thin brush. It worked out fine enough. But you should be very precise with the mouse movements. I also used the Push Pin to add single pixels of the transition area to the selection. It was good for the separate whiskers. In the resulted mask there were some shreds around the whiskers. Even after I had worked with the Eraser and the Brush. So, when I applied the selection I used Blur on the edges and it made the picture not so ragged.

You can also use the Edge Feather Tool (lets you remove jagged edges from the processed foreground). It makes the edges not so ragged but the fur is lost anyway.
Still, around the whiskers of this animal Edge feather tool did not leave any shreds of the background like in the picture below.

When I was working with the picture of baby manul I had to deal with singular whiskers. When it is human hair – await long tedious job. Only then you’ll have satisfactory results. Or not satisfactory (inside object tool in 100% magnification, touch up with 1 pixel restore brush).

The bulk of the hair is seen in the masked image all right. But then the single strands go there’s some trouble. I first tried to solve the problem by working with the Brush (Touch UP) at the minimum thickness – 1px. But, as you see the result was not good. Those airy strands begun to look just like wire.

My next attempt was to change the approach. This time I didn’t try to follow every hair but allowed the program to work on the transition area.

As you see I tried to avoid passing the Inside tool through any areas where the background is showing through the girl’s hair. The ouside line at the same time leaves off every strand of hair. (And only then I downloaded the Tutorial which told me I was right!)

The result of the first procession was fine but for the bits of almost transparent background.
To remove them I used the Pincers (Outside Image mode) and marked as Outside the single pixels of the background color I didn’t need (You can also use the feather and syringe tools and process the image again).
This procedure had to be repeated several times. And the result still was not satisfactory enough.
But at the third time I chose to try retouch tools (note: if you process the image again after the use of them all retouching will be lost).
So I removed the bits of the background with the eraser (where I could do it, for it is very difficult to eraze between the tangled strands of hair). And finally applied the image to return to Photoshop. There I loaded selection.
And here’s the final result, most of the details are in their place, several separate strands can be seen, although the ends look a bit gnawed.
By the way, I didn’t quite understand why the resulted selection looked differently in Photoshop than in Knock Out 2 itself. So I tried to apply the same selection to Corel PhotoPaint and the result was indeed different.
It looks like Photoshop takes only fully opaque parts of the masked image into selection. Wheras PhotoPaint retaines halftransparent foreground colors of the transition area in the final selection. There are drawbacks to it, of course. In the sample fragment, for example, the traces of background can be seen. But they are half transparent and barely seen. The hair, at the same time, looks wonderful.

Transparencies

Working with transparencies is a separate issue altogether and you cannot do without the manual. The basic rule for transparencies is to do the outside selection first and then pin a number of pixels of opaque places in the mainly transparent object (I experimented with this dragonfly). The resulted picture had transparencies in opaque places and contained background in most transparent places. The manual turned out not to be over-detailed on the subject. I did the pinning several times, used different places. The best thing I could get is shown below. As you see, on the one hand, the fiber of the wing is lost mostly; on the other hand, the transparencies between the fibers are in the image. May be the Tutorial shows it better?

With the wine glass (above) it was a little better but still – a lot of background color leaked through and had to be erased, a number of flashes was lost; the semitransparent stem became transparent after the first attempt and looks a bit strange in the second.

Shadow

Knock Out 2 allows to select not only objects but their shadows as well. There’s a second pair of selecting tools for it: Inside Shadow and Outside Shadow. They work just the same as the main selecting tools, with all the options accessible. On the picture below you see a selected CD case with its shadow falling on the desk also selected. The result is very good. And the selection process goes smooth and easy. You can even work with the shadows of transparent objects in the same manner.

So the program gives a rather good overall impression. It is easy to set up, has a good clear manual and several tutorials covering the main subtleties, and a friendly intuitively understandable interface. Once you found the way to draw the outlines the selection process will take less and less time with you. The weakest point of KnockOut 2 is the selection of transparent objects, and it can loose fine details at the edge when the background is clustered or has colors similar to foreground ones (see manul picture).

If you need to make a lot of selections and cutouts KnockOut 2 will be a great help for it really speeds up the process and makes it much easier.

KnockOut 2 is sold directly from Corel website at the price of $99 (quite fair for the things it can do): Buy Now - Corel KnockOut 2 Unfortunately, there is no trial available for KnockOut, and you can only work with the bought and registered copy. The good news is the 30 days money back guarantee, that is you can return it if you are not satisfied.

Look also at the  comparison of selecting tools and selection results and at the rating of the plug-ins.

Useful links:

Corel Corporation

More Info - Corel KnockOut 2

Buy Now - Corel KnockOut 2

Free Corel Tutorials

Corel Graphics Software

Free Trial - CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X4

Corel.com - Official Store Order Now & Save $100’s of Dollars on Corel’s Top Brands