Camera - Action - Cut!

Creating our first cut out with Fluid Mask 2.0 was very quick, it took me less than 50 seconds from start to finish, but this was an easy image to work with. Nevertheless the actual cut out was very good, but perhaps not as I would have liked, the girls hair was cut too tight for my liking. Below are a series of cut out using various tools in Photoshop and Corel's Knockout 2 application.

Photoshop Magic Wand Tool set to 32	Detail
Photoshop Extract filter	Detail
Corel KnockOut 2	Detail
Fluid Mask 2.0	Detail
Not all the hair is included (left), use the Complex brush to increase the size of the blue transition line

Looking at the above pictures; Photoshop's Magic Wand was a quick basic selection and then the backgrounds content was deleted from the selection. This is OK for quick rough work, but as you can see the girls hair has been over chopped. The Extract filter has produced a better hair line, but on other parts of the image there's been too much blending, look at her hands. Of course this could have been improved by adjusting the brush size etc, but it all takes time. At first glance Corel's KnockOut seems to have performed a good job, the hair is well defined, perhaps the best in this batch, but again the hands have suffered, this could be improved with more detailed foreground and background selections. On closer inspection of the KnockOut file there is a lot of excess baggage in terms of noise, floating like a halo around the edges of the cut out. This may not show up on this reduced JPEG, but it is very clear on the full size file. Not an ideal cut out.

The best cut out was created by Fluid Mask and it was the quickest (not counting the Magic Wand). The edge transitions are clean, the hair looks tidy, maybe a bit too tidy as a few of the strands have disappeared. The bottom two screen shots show the mask created by Fluid Mask (left) and a manual widening of the blue transition area, use the Complex brush for this. The extra width ensures more strands of hair are included.

The final shot below is a composite of the Fluid Mask cut out and a stock shot I had in my library - it's always worth taking extra shots for use as backgrounds.

Shot's like this can be created in minutes