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(Page 3 of 4) Complex Mask Apart from the Keep and Drop brushes Fluid Mask has a Complex mask brush (painting in blue by default). If the Edge Detection helps with defining the zones to be kept or dropped, Complex mask covers the edge zone where Fluid Mask defines what is to be selected itself.
When the image is sharp and stands clear against the background you can have a thin Complex Mask automatically created (As with magnolia or tulip images). But it also can be used when masking such complex images as those containing hair or transparent areas.
Hair and furWith hair you just apply a rather thick Complex Mask in the region where the image has both hair and background colors. The results though may be different.
The picture of the girl on white background is ideal for masking. As you see I just drew a thick line around the head with the Complex Brush and that was all.
Other images did not go that easy though. When I had dark hair against the dark red background or fair hair against the cluttered background with some light colors in it the mask either dropped too much of hair or took in too much of the background.
The dark-haired girl’s selection looks unnatural.
As for the little girl with tails, the background colors contained in the selection are clearly seen on the light color background but are not so visible on the dark background.
And, of course, not all hair strands are retained. Working with fur is the task of the same sort as masking hair. The picture of the baby manul looks particularly difficult to mask because of the similar colors in the animal and the background cage, and the fuzzy edges. Working with the image according to the tutorial , I painted Complex Mask over the fur edges, then applied Local Keep brush from within the image and Local Drop brush from the outside.
The result was fine in the places where the fur is whitish and more or less of the same color. But on the head, ears and back of the animal where there are spots of different color, the resulted edge was very rough. And with the absence of any restoration tool this could not be mended. No matter how accurately and how many times I tried to improve the masking the complex mask could not give me the needed fur edge. And you see that the very edges of fur are clipped.Transparences, brunches, tracery objects and the likeI took the picture of the green leaves (you can see the original used as background for the tulip) to test the Global brushes, those that take in all like colors in the image. Global Drop brush worked well and covered almost all the background except for the inside corners of the leaves at one click. Those places were filled in with the Exact Drop brush with a 3 px head. After this was done I noticed a couple of stems a little blurred and transparent to the rear. This was obviously the Complex mask area. After the procession I saw that those stems worked out very well.
Therefore, I thought of the other half transparent areas in the image and covered all such places with the complex mask blue. The result was good. You can see the background color through the leaves and they do look half transparent.
This was, in fact, so good that I thought of selecting a proper transparent object, the glass. This proved to be not so satisfying. This time the global brush took in almost all the background and most of the glass itself. I first painted all the remaining areas with complex mask. But in the cutout the wineglass almost disappeared. Then I applied the Keep brush in some of the places, which required a lot of precision. The result of the experiment was only barely satisfying though.
But again, on the image of a dragonfly, with its half transparent wings, Fluid Mask worked well.
One more image where complex mask worked very well has a very dark leafless tree against the bright sky. I first thought of using the Global brush again or the Regions tool, but those did not work. My use of the Complex mask was almost intuitive. I decided to treat those brunches as hair. So the whole tree (and delicate grass stems as well) was painted over with the Complex mask brush and the result was perfect.To sum it all I should say that the success of the selection with the Complex mask depends to a large extent on the sharpness and contrast of the image. The sharper it is and the more opposite the colors are the better the result will be.
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