So you select all the colours you want to keep, and all the colours you want to remove, and then use the magic brush. The difference is that in onOne Mask Pro you can select multiple colours in one go. OnOne Mask Pro features a colour selection technology similar to Topaz Remask 3, where you select what colour you want to keep and what colour you want to remove. So you can easily spend a very long time refining the mask.Īnd unfortunately, even with the new colour selection brush, I still found it very hard to get a good result with all the sky removed and all of the tree kept. And you need to re-brush each area for each colour that you want to keep or remove. This certainly helps in improving the mask compared to Remask 2, however the maximum brush size in Topaz Remask 3 is very small, and so brushing a large area takes a long time. Topaz Remask 3 comes with new colour selection brushes that you can use to either add or remove from your mask based on the selected colour. I also only tested each of the plugins on one image, so this is more of an initial quick look comparison than a proper test. However, I'm sure that a more experienced user could get much better results with each of the programs than I did in my test today. So I decided to test the new Topaz Remask 3, onOne Mask Pro, and Vertus Fluid Mask 3 to see how they compare at separating a tree from the sky.Īll the plugins come with good documentation / online videos describing how to use them. I sometimes use Topaz Remask when merging together bracketed images to increase the dynamic range of an image, but Topaz Remask 2 wasn't very good at masking trees where the sky shows through gaps in the leaves. For pictures that have small pockets needing erasing, it's handy to flick between the source and workspace tabs to see what needs doing.Topaz Labs recently (December 2010) released version 3 of their masking program, Topaz Remask. The brush will change the image red or green depending on the one you choose so you can easily see what you're keeping and erasing. There are three brushes to choose from with varying degrees of precision from the fine detail brush to the global brush which is more brutish at removing large patches of dead image. Choose green if you want to keep the segment and choose red if you want to remove it. You use the tools on the left to decide which parts of the picture to keep and they're allocated into a simple colour coding system. It's these segments that you use for deciding which part of the picture you'll keep and which you want to delete.ĭeleting any part of the image makes it transparent on the cut-out canvas. The workspace tab is the main window you'll use and shows the picture segmented up. Clicking on the source tab shows the picture as it is in its pure form even when you've masked and cut it up. The main picture has three tabs at the top titled source, workspace and cut-out. The left side houses all the tools you'll need for effectively masking our image, the middle shows the picture uploaded into the program and the right side holds a few other nifty features which we'll cover in a bit.
The layout hasn't changed with this upgraded version but for those of you who are new to Fluid Mask, it's laid out into three sections. It's as though it takes over the identity of Photoshop. However, Photoshop can't be opened again while Fluid Mask is open. Interestingly, when Fluid Mask opens, it temporarily closes down Photoshop as it disappears from the task bar. To use it as a plug-in for Photoshop, you must have the picture you want to manipulate open then go to the Filter tab and choose Vertus at the bottom of the list. Installation only takes a few minutes after download and the program is ready to go. The full version is available as a trial for 14 days and when you decide to buy it after, you can input the licence key directly in the program.
We downloaded the program from the Vertus website which is quick and easy to do. Vertus Fluid Mask 3.2 costs $149 £99.99 and is available at. The base program is now around 4 years old but Vertus have been upgrading and improving it to what it is today. Its unique segmented masking procedure makes selecting the parts of the photograph you want to keep easy even for ultra fine details such as hair or fur. Vertus Fluid Mask 3.2 is a high quality masking program for what is essentially cutting images out and putting on top of others.