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Selecting Images with MaskPro |
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(Page 2 of 3) Quick Masking with sharp contrasting color images.When you have a good quality sharp image with a distinctive difference between the foreground and background colors you can use the quick masking, or so the manual says.
With the tulip picture I had such an image. First I applied the quick masking recipe the manual gives: chose keep and drop colors and double clicked the Magic Brush Tool. The result was not perfect at first but all the problems were easily solved with the better choice of the colors and some quick work with the Brush in both Restore and Erase modes.
But in this image the edge of the object to be selected is very distinct. This opens up another option: you can use Magic Pen for your selection which I did. In my case it traced the edges perfectly, better than Magic Brush. The minor problems were with narrow spaces between the curly petal edges. Those I deleted with the Magic Brush by choosing the color to be dropped. As you see the result is very good in both cases and you can hardly see any difference. As for the time consumed by the process, it is more or less the same.
Complex Images
You wouldn’t encounter images similar to the tulip above very often in real life. Most of the time we come across something more complex with blurred edges, cluttered backgrounds, lots of hair strands, and transparent objects. Even within one image there are easier and more complex edges. MaskPro policy is to use the particular tool for the particular edge.
Magic Pen & Magic Brush
In the photo of the girl with black hair all the edges are distinct and there’re few colors. The hand, face, shoulder and the black T-shirt all have a clear and smooth line, perfect, in fact, for being traced with the Magic Pen. The time consumed by selection at this stage would be within 5-10 minutes. I performed the selection in sections leaving out hair and earrings for the Magic Brush.
To select hair I first chose three Keep colors (the darkest black, the grayish tone of the fringe and the midtone)and one Drop color (white background).
With these I applied Magic Brush. But it turned out that the fringe on the right needed more attention and had to be dealt with separately: it became too transparent. So I restored the image with the Brush and created a new Color Set especially for this section of the image. And then I applied Magic Brush again, this time with better results.
The part that needed correction (with the Brush in Restore mode mostly) was the white and black hair piece on the top. (Now I think, I had to apply regular Pencil to that part as well).
Another Color Set was needed to select the earrings with the Magic Brush (it is the bottom Keep Color Set). And then I used regular Brush to erase the rest of the background (There’s a Cleanup view mode in MaskPro that is very useful at this stage. It allows to see not only all the gaps but the transparent areas as well).
The resulted image looks very good to me, and on different backgrounds, too.
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