Fluid Mask - image selection tool review
- Provides: Selection of easy or very highly complex items in an image with high precision
- Format: Download or CD
- Developer: Vertus Technology
- Minimum Requirements: G4 PowerPC-based or Mac Intel-based processor, Mac OS X v10.2.8, SVGA monitor with 24-bit color display
- Processor Compatibility: Universal
- Retail Price: New: $239.00, Upgrade: $100
- Availability: Out now
- Version Reviewed: 3.0.2
Photoshop is filled with redundant features. For every task there needs to be a variety of mechanisms to accomplish the same thing, because every image is different. And because every image is different, some tools work better in one image while other tools work better in other images. Amongst those redundancies, none of them have more redundancy than selection tools. I just made a mental count of about a dozen different ways to create a selection in Photoshop, and when it gets right down to it, that's not enough. That's why there are third-party solutions, and I have to admit that of all of the solutions I've seen, none creates as good of a selection as Fluid Mask 3. With great power comes great responsibility, however, and that means that Fluid Mask has a greater learning curve and is a bit more challenging to learn. But the results you achieve will be exactly what you wanted.
Selections are necessary for a variety of reasons: enhancing the ground and leaving the sky alone, removing Uncle Ted from a family photo, the list goes on and on. The general trick for making a selection is separating what you want from what you don't—and convincing Photoshop which is which. Certain aspects of the selection process are fairly easy: look for edges and use those edges to help define what's "keep" and what's "toss."
For this review, I've selected two different images to test Fluid Mask. One has a fairly easy subject to select while the other is intended to be a challenge.
The easy image is shown below. This image has a number of things that make it a good candidate to demonstrate the basic processes of Fluid Mask. For one, the yellow flower is unique from everything else in the photo, there's nothing else bright yellow in the image. In addition, the flower is mostly in focus while most of the background is out of focus. Thus, it has fewer edges.
Photoshop already has the capabilities to find edges; if you go into Filter -> Stylize -> Find Edges... you will get the following image.
What I'm trying to demonstrate in the above image is that software can locate and detail edges. The catch is, can it help extract an image? Photoshop introduced (several versions ago) a feature called "Extract" that helps to do just that. You draw a line around an object you want to extract and fill that object with a Keep bucket and fill the outside with a Toss bucket. Sometimes it did a very good job, but there were often occasional edges that needed some finessing. Also, as the edge of the thing that you wanted to keep got closer in color and shading with the background, the less quality you got in the separation. [When I used Extract on this image, it did a fairly good job, but much of the flower was semi-transparent along the edges. Thus, while it did a fairly quick job on selecting the flower and identifying the edges, the final result had some severe limitations.]
Fluid Mask is both a plugin to Photoshop (CS2 & CS3) and a separate application that you can access as a plug-in via the Photoshop Filter menu (-> Vertus -> Fluid Mask). When you open an image in Fluid Mask, the program first automatically analyzes the image. This process can be followed in a growing bar across the bottom of the window. The length of this process is dependent up the size of the image and the image's complexity. Once the analysis is complete, the image looks like a stained glass window, as seen below. [If you were curious about the strange icon that Fluid Mask uses (see top of the review), perhaps now its origin is perfectly clear.]
Like most other extraction programs, there are a host of tools to help you instruct the program what you want to keep and toss from the image. I've created 1:1 screen shots of specific parts of the window above that is reduced in size. Below are the tools of Fluid Mask. The top six are the primary keep and toss tools. Green is keep and Red is toss (but Vertus called them "Delete"). Any tool with a bottom facing triangle has other options. A "pencil" icon denotes absolute pixel control of either keep or toss while a brush with a few circles denotes "local" keep and toss while the brush with the larger circles denotes global effects of keep and toss. Blue is used for "Blend" regions, e.g., the regions between keep and toss. Curiously the blue Blend tool provides the same "exact," "local," and "global" options, whereas the two Keep and Delete tools are separated out to each have their own tool location. The square on the mid-left (the Rectangle Patch) lets you focus unique action in any region defined within that rectangle. The pen tool, mid-right, lets you define regions of your choice as a border between keep and toss. The icon of a thing poking through a rectangle is an eyedropper sampler, while the camera lets you get "snapshot" samples within a Rectangle Patch. The thing that looks like a tape measure is a clean up tool. The arrow, hand, and magnifying glass are what they appear to be. The color square over the grid is the color that appears behind a selection in Cut-out mode. Clicking on this lets you change the cut-out background color, which is handy if your image happens to have the same color as the background color. The face to Face icon initiates the cut-out process.
The controls across the top vary depending on what tool you are using. Here, there is a brush for either keep or toss. The size is the size of the brush, strength varies the range of tolerance effected by that brush. The larger the number, the more variations will be effected by dragging the brush across the image. That is, if you are moving across a field of grass, the larger the "Strength" the more variations of the green grass will be selected. The "Protect Mask" for Keep, Delete and Blend lets you set any given region for keep, toss or blend. If you inadvertently drag a keep brush across a toss region, the toss region will not change. [By the way, this strip across the top of the window is the Preferences for Fluid Mask. If you select Preferences from the Fluid Mask menu, this strip goes away. Re-selecting Preferences brings it back.]
Fortunately there is a lot of crossover from Photoshop as far as general operations. A number of key commands are the same, as well as general interactions such as pressing the Space Bar to access the Hand control to move an image around. My biggest regret is that the key commands for accessing the Keep Exact brush is "k," the Local Brush is "shift-k," while the Global Brush is "Command-k." All logical, but I would have just as well have been satisfied with simply pressing the "k" key three times to cycle through the various types of Keep brushes to avoid having to press modifier keys. If I can press one key to get what I want, that's great. But if I have to press a chord to get what I want, it's often easier to simply click on the tool with the mouse. Unfortunately, there is no mechanism to change key commands.
Across the right side of the window are other regions for fine-tuning your selection tools. The top is a Navigator that is exactly like the Navigator in Photoshop. Edge finding lets you set the sensitivity of the threshold. If you think of a gradation of color, such as a woman's cheek with rouge, there is no edge. However, if you have a tight threshold, Fluid Mask will place an edge line between the dark red and the less dark red. As you continue to increase the threshold, there will be more and more regions on the cheek. The number of edges will, well, find more edges. The Blend Mask With defines what kind of edge will occur between regions that you want to keep versus those that you want to toss. This is like feathering an edge; the wider the blend mask, the greater the feather, and vise versa. On the very bottom are tips depending on what tool you have selected—no space is wasted!!
Because I want to select the flower, and the flower is uniquely colored in this image, the easiest way to select the flower is by selecting the colors. In Photoshop, you could do the same kind of thing by using the "Color Range..." option in the Select menu.
To do this, you use another tool/window: the Color Workspace. This can be opened by either the Window menu, the letter C, or any time you create a Rectangle Patch. There are multiple ways to arrange the colors; below, I'm using the Hue option to select the colors mostly found in the flower. As you can see, to the right are a few other regions with the same colors—later, I will change those to toss selections. Once I've dragged across the colors I want to keep, I click on the paint bucket to the left that lets me create a mask of those selections for keeping.
Once I've selected the colors (and thereby the item) that I want, I can go to the "Image" menu and select "Auto Fill with Delete." When that is selected, anything that doesn't already have a mask will be filled with the Delete option. The reverse of all this is equally true; if it's easier to use color to select everything you don't want, you can select "Auto Fill with Keep" to achieve the alternate selection. Once that is done, I can use the "Local Delete" on the few regions that received the Keep mask that shouldn't have received the Keep designation. Then I can either click on the "Create cut-out" button or press "Command-u," and the following image is what I get with the first pass to select the flower. This isn't bad for literally about 2-3 minutes work. But it has some issues.
If you look at the lower right side of the image above and zoomed in a bit (image #1 below) you can see how parts of the flower are a bit choppy. The top three images below also show one of the fantastic strengths of Fluid Mask. If you look at the full Fluid Mask window earlier on in this review, you can see three separate tabs called "Source," "Workspace," and "Cut-out." Although I have them out of order below, #2 represents the "Source" tab. Here, you see the image without any distraction or alteration. Number 3 shows the work area, and you can see both the edge lines, the keep and toss regions, boundaries, and any other artifacts of the selection process. Lastly, #1 shows the result of any selection. What I do love about Fluid Mask is that you can go back and forth from any of these tabs (or by pressing the "1," "2," or "3" key) to view any part of the process as needed. Also, if you are in #2 and all of the border lines are just too much to look at, you can turn them off as needed. However, keep in mind that when you select the Cut-out view, this does not initiate a Cut-out operation. That is a separate action. This only lets you see the result of a cutout. That also means that if you haven't initiated a Cut-out operation, when you select the Cut-out view you will not see anything in particular.
What I'm doing in numbers 4 and 5 is decreasing the Edge With Threshold and increasing the Number of Edges to get more control on the edge of the leaf. The final results are in image #6.
I'm not going to take the space of the final image, but suffice it to say, it came out beautifully. But like I said in the beginning of the flower project, that's an easy image to select. Now for a challenge: a brown dog on a wood floor with shadows. [By the way, this is a Pembroke Welsh Corgi. The legs were not chopped off, they come that way.]
Once this image is opened in Fluid Mask, the edge location process begins and displays the following result. Using color as a separator is a waste of time with this image, but also, the dog's fur creates a varying edge. Around the top of his nose is a reasonably clean edge, but his neck and legs are, well, furry. There is no clean edge to work with for most of the way around the dog. As an experiment, I tried simply filling in the appropriate keep and toss regions, but the results were not worth showing.
After going through the various Tutorials (more on these later), I realized what I need to do is define the Blend regions first. This is done with the Blue tool found just below the assorted Delete tools, and it is to be used in a broad pattern. Once you've defined the regions to be classified as "Blend," you can fill in by painting with the Keep brush. By the way, to keep the quality of your Blend, there is an option at the top of this window that lets you protect either the Keep, the Delete, or the Blend region. This means that as you paint over whatever you established as protected, you can't paint over the region that has been identified as "Protected."
If you look very closely at your image at this point, you are likely to see small specks of regions that didn't get brushed with the Keep brush. You can either magnify up close and find and brush each one or select the "Clean Up" tool and click on the image. As seen below, on the top photo you can see small brown flecks that were not touched by the Keep brush. You can also see that the Clean Up tool is selected, and in the image you can see a cursor in the shape of a "plus." In the bottom image is the result of clicking that—all regions that are below some established size are absorbed by the master Keep or Delete region. This works very well.
Once that is completed, you can use the same trick as before by going to the "Image" menu and selecting "Auto Fill with Delete." Once selecting the Create Cut-out button this time, the results were substantially better. The image did need some fine-tuning. But again, one of the great strengths of Fluid Mask is that you can fine-tune over and over and never leave the Fluid Mask environment.
Below you can see one of the small areas that needed fine-tuning. For some unknown reason the upper part of the nose had several small portions chopped out of it. Close examination in the Workspace revealed I had somehow created a chopped up region in the Blend region. The best way to fix this was to take the Eraser tool (when you select the Eraser tool, any Protection of a region type is automatically turned off. You can always turn this on for any region, but the default is off—which is good). In image 3 you can see that I've erased both sides of the Blend region, and in #4 I've redrawn a cleaner Blend region. In #5 I've already repainted the Keep and Delete region (when you click on either Keep or Delete, your Protection setting automatically kicks in again). Finally, in #6, you can see the result—great.
As they say, the proof is in the pudding. This is the final selection:
[For point of information, that's how William's chin area is—it's kind of straggly.]
Some extra issues: Fluid Mask is very compatible with a Wacom Tablet. In fact, I got significantly better results when drawing the Blend region with the Wacom Tablet than I did with my mouse. And yes, Fluid Mask does work with the variable pressures provided by the Wacom Tablet.
The Patch tool is sort of a mixed blessing in the wrong type of image. At one point, I wanted to see how it would work to bring out the single hair as seen below. I played with a few settings, and when I attempted the cutout, rather than seeing a hair, it changed the specific region of the Blend inside versus outside of the patch section. If you look at the bottom of the images below, you can see the straight line of the patch region. Fortunately, deleting the patch region removed the offending blend effect.
When you finish working on your image, you can save the Fluid Mask compilation of your image so you can stop and start on the same image over and over. You can also save out the final image (it's saved as a .png). Lastly, the manual claims you can "Save and Apply" the image, which saves your results and replaces the image in Photoshop that you brought into Fluid Mask to begin with. For reasons unknown to me, I do not have this option. However, I actually prefer that I'm saving my image as a new image and not replacing the original, so this limitation does not bother me.
Vertus has placed a number of video tutorials on their website, and some of them are quite good. However, all of them have the same problem in that the speaker says he's working on a region of the image but occasionally the size and resolution of the image make it very difficult to see where he's working on the image and/or what he's doing. He also needs to tell the viewer what he's doing a bit more than what he does. One of the "tricks" that is done on Photoshop TV is that whenever they refer to a tool, they typically "zoom" into the tools to show you the tool. While this seems a bit annoying at times and adds time to the whole tutorial, it proves to be very important as seen by these tutorials that do not do that. However, If you look at the tutorials, then try to work with the program, then re-look at the tutorials, you will learn a lot. It appears that if you have a particularly challenging image, you can send it to Vertus; if they feel your image has something to offer, they will make a Tutorial of the image.
The manual is all web-based, and there is no PDF support. The manual is not as deep as it needs to be.
You can download a trial copy of this program to see if you like it, and I recommend you do. I also recommend you plan out a 2-3 hour block of time to work through the Fluid Mask process. Take an easy image as I did, and then a more challenging image. Do try it. I also recommend you try to select the item using other selection tools and compare the results.
This is without a doubt the best selection tool I've used. Fluid Mask is more difficult to use than other selection programs I've worked with, but it's worth the time to learn. It's not that difficult, but as there are multiple ways to approach different image types, it's not as if you can learn one technique and suddenly know everything about selecting in Fluid Mask.
If you have never had an image that ever gave you a challenge for selection, that's great. But if you've had difficulties trying to select hair, an out of focus edge, or the light coming from between the leaves of a tree, than you will appreciate the results you get from Fluid Mask. The results prove to make the extra learning curve and challenges worth every second invested. Lastly, this is a standalone application and you do not need Photoshop to use Fluid Mask.
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