Digital Photographer's Software Guide - Bertemes - Net

11
Masking Tools
Photoshop owes much of its success to its masking capability, which allows you to separate
an object from its background. Despite this, there are many other tools that bring
additional features, greater ease-of-use, or sheer speed to the process.
One of the classic applications of masking is changing the background in a portrait.
This can present a serious challenge to the masking tool when there is fine hair detail
seen against an in-focus background. Even if the background is out of focus, the task is
beyond the scope of conventional tools that require manual tracing of the boundary.
Fortunately, specialist tools can come to the rescue. They tend to take two approaches—
they either play it safe by insisting that you take the original portrait against a blue or
green chroma key background, or else they use sophisticated sampling algorithms to
differentiate between the pixels belonging to the background and those belonging
to the foreground object. Primatte Chromakey from Digital Anarchy is a good example
of the first approach; EZ Mask from motion picture tools specialist Digital Film Tools
is a good example of the second.
The masking software listed here ranges from the low-cost (Recomposit) to the fairly
expensive (Primatte Chromakey).