I am seriously impressed by today's imaging tip, a Photoshop plugin by the name of Fluid Mask from Vertus. Anyone who's ever had to make a spot-on cutout of complex figures like trees, hair or this frog here - this one's for you. Fluid Mask is a powerful plugin for creating the perfect mask complete with its own toolset, a regional color picker, edge detection that's borderline intelligent and a bit of a new concept called the Image Imformation Layer. Check out Vertus's cutout gallery for some prime examples of this plugin's power, as well as their tutorials page to get up to speed with this most impressive of masking and cutout plugins. While the plugin is OSX only right now, they have a Windows version coming soon. If I've caught your attention, go snag a free trial.
[via PhotoshopSupport]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
8-05-2005 @ 4:34PM
jeremy said...
I thought this product would be around $100 but I was way off for those of you that want a better product at a much lower price (probably a steaper learning curve though) is knockout2 originaly by some other company but bought by corel.
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8-07-2005 @ 5:11PM
nona pena said...
I am a new (PC based) user and am confused rather, I understand when you say Knockout is (much) cheaper but it seems you are ALSO saying it is "better" than Fluid Mask - which is an Apple Mac product anyway.
Mask Pro seems to be the other option.
Are any of them really necessary though ?
You seem to know about these trhings; what do you recommend and why ?
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8-07-2005 @ 6:42PM
David Chartier said...
I personally haven't tried Knockout2, but Fluid Mask's power and accuracy honestly impress me, but consider: at $400 this isn't exactly a plugin for the John Everyman home Photoshop user. This is a little more for high-end and professional environments, some of which I've worked in, where difficult and very, very high-detailed masks and cutouts like this need to be made on a daily and sometimes hourly basis. Tools like this make mince-meat out of difficult-to-mask areas such as hair, and hard to cutout areas such as this frog, where the colors in the overall image are tough to discern for normal selection and lasso tools. If you're a home user who's mainly interested in delving into Photoshop's power, I'd rather recommend picking up a good book that teaches you the fundamentals of making a good selection and masking using the already-powerful tools Photoshop gives you out of the box. Hope this helps!
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