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Provides: Extra tools for making selections and masks in Photoshop or PS Elements
Developer: OnOne Software
Minimum Requirements: Mac OS X v10.4.4, Photoshop CS2 or Elements 3 or 4. [Currently Mask Pro can only be run with the Photoshop CS3 beta in Rosetta mode. onOne Software promises to have Universal version update available for free by the time that Photoshop CS3 is shipped.]
Retail Price: New: $159.95, Upgrade: $69.95.
If you've spent any time with Photoshop, you've made a selection. If you want to put some political person's head on some unspeakable monster's body, you have to make a selection. If you want to lengthen the model's legs, you need to make a selection, if you want to enhance part of an image but leave the rest of the image alone, you need to make a selection. Yes, there are other things you can do in Photoshop, but many of the things you do in Photoshop start with making a selection. Mask Pro 4 will add expanded power to your selection making tools. Keep in mind that there is no Magic Tool, and even with Mask Pro you cannot "click once" on the screen and have your image properly selected, but with the range of tools provided, used individually or collectively, Mask Pro can give you a better result than with anything else I've seen.
New with version 4 are a host of video tutorials. This is probably one of the better things they could have added to Mask Pro because one of the problems with the earlier versions (originally made by Extensis who have subsequently sold Mask One and other Photoshop plug-ins to onOne Software) was profound bewilderment as to what tool to use for what and why is there Mask Pro Select and Mask Pro, and, well, it was a lot to take in.
There are no new tools with version 4, but Mask Pro does provide a few tool improvements, the most important being a more integrated support with Wacom Tablets (more on that later). Also new with version 4 are Numerical values in the Tool Options palette, tools auto-scroll when you reach a screen edge, highlighted regions are now protected from touch-up tools, and you can now switch between the keep or toss eyedropper by pressing the Command key. You can also constrain the pen tool to 45° lines via the Shift key.
I will talk about other improvements during the review, but probably the biggest reason to update, if you have version 3, and you have a new Intel based Mac, is a commitment by onOne software to update to a Universal version of Mask Pro 4 by the time that Photoshop CS3 ships.
Remember, if you have non-universal plug-ins, you have to run Photoshop CS3 in Rosetta mode.
Seeing edges to make selections:
The whole issue about making selections in Photoshop, whether directly by eye or using software tools, is looking for edges. An edge will either be distinctive by a color change or a lightness/darkness change.
To demonstrate the whole issue of seeing edges, when I'm demonstrating how to make selections in Photoshop, I like to show an image that I found ages ago. The challenge is to select only the Thai model and not the sky. If there had been a busy background, this would be a tremendous challenge. However, because the background is so plane and consistent, Photoshop's Magic Wand tool is all that's necessary. Depending on how wide you set the Tolerance, a click or two will very easily select the sky, and if you turned off "Contiguous" in the Tool Options, you will easily make active all the nooks and crannies. Then, by simply "inverting" your selection, you will then have selected the model.
The bad news is that the chance you will have such an easy selection in your images is rare at best. That's why so much has been written on how to make selections in Photoshop, and why extra products, like Mask Pro, are sold to help you in your quest for perfect selections.
To start Mask Pro is to start the confusion. Either from the Filter menu or from the newly created onOne menu, you can select Mask Pro for the drop-down selection "Mask Pro..." or you can select Mask Pro Select to access the "Mask Pro Select..." or the "Mask Pro 4 Make Work Path..." Oh, where to begin, where to start?
The difference between Masking and Selecting (according to onOne) is with Masking you define what you want to keep and remove all of the other pixels on the image. When you select, you define what pixels you want to work with (or avoid), and back in Photoshop you will see the "marching ants" for the selected region. Curiously, if you select the "Mask Pro 4..." option, you can do a Selection, but if you chose the "Mask Pro 4 Select..." option you cannot do a Mask.
Otherwise, the biggest difference to the user is that you can open up an image and start working directly on making a Selection. If you chose to make a Mask, you will probably get the following warning:
Simply put, because a background layer cannot have transparency, and a mask cannot be stored in a channel, you must prepare your image to work with Mask Pro 4 before you begin. This is not really very hard, you can:
- Double-click the background layer so that it is not a background layer (a background layer cannot have transparency in Photoshop) [Note: if you double click the background layer in Photoshop, a window will pop up asking you to name the layer. If you do not give it a name and simply click the OK button, what was the background layer will now be called "layer 0."]
- Alternatively, if you have reasons to keep your background layer, you can also go into the Channels palette, create a new channel (and give it a white fill). When you do this, the image will go all white and the RGB channels will be unchecked. Re-check the RGB channels (so you can see your image again) and then you can continue with making a Mask.
- Lastly, perhaps the easiest way to proceed with making a Mask is to simply duplicate your image into a new layer [Command-j]. I like this mechanism the best because this keeps your original image around, and if you screw up and want to start again from scratch or removed a bit too much and want to "borrow" some of the original image to paste into your Masked version, you can.
In general, regardless of what you chose to do with your image, always make a copy of the image you want to work with. Never do anything to the only image you have. The reason for this is simple; as good as Mask Pro is, as good as Photoshop is, in the future they are going to make something better. If you do not have a back up image, you may never have a chance to go back and "do it better." Also, if you cut out a relative from a family photo, you never know when a couple will reconcile in the future.
Lastly, before I begin the formal aspect of this review, I am not displaying all that's new in Mask Pro because it's a very deep program and I feel that if I focus on three different aspects in its use, the reader will get a better picture of what can be done with Mask Pro than if I just focused on new features. These include improved Navigators and a new Tip and Shortcut palette. In addition, there is functionality for viewing a Mask that I do not discuss, as well as images in RGB or CMYK color space. This review is sufficiently long as it is.
Making a selection in Mask Pro 4:
If there is an easily defined edge in your image, you can Select the item with the Magic Pen Tool and the Pen Tool. As seen below, the Magic Pen Tool is similar to the Magnetic Lasso found in Photoshop, but much smarter. The big problem with Photoshop's Magnetic Lasso is if it goes off line, it's a big battle between you and the delete key to return to where things went amiss. If the Magic Pen Tool goes off, just back up to where the problem started and continue. It's amazingly simple and after a try or two, the Magic Pen Tool seems to figure out what you wanted intended the tool to select. At some point, if the region of the image is too obscure to properly "see" an edge, you can select the regular Pen tool which acts just like the Pen Tool in Photoshop.
Using the Magic Pen Tool and Pen Tool, I was easily able to select this clock on the wall. (I gave the image a different background in Photoshop to demonstrate how I had selected the clock.) It was in the shadowed left side of the clock where I had to rely upon the Pen tool to place points where I knew they were, but Mask Pro couldn't adequately see the edge.
The biggest problem with the Pen Tool is that it leaves a Bezier line, and the one tool that Mask Pro is missing is a standard Direct Selection Tool. What you are required to do is press the Command key when the pen tool is selected access to access the Bezier handles and points, but it's far too easy to inadvertently tap inside the (now closed) line initiating the final selection process. Fortunately it is possible to undo (Command-z) and return to the line, but a formal Direct Selection Tool is truly needed here. Otherwise, Mask Pro's Magic Pen Tool puts Photoshop's Magic Lasso to major shame.
Before I leave the issue of Selection, if you look at the Menu selection for Selection, you can see that there is a second option of "Make Work Path..." This is used after you have made your selection and wish to refine the selection. Choke will define how tight the selection is to the original image: Tighter will constrict the selection on the image while Looser will expand the selection beyond the range of the original selection. Meanwhile, Tolerance will increase or decrease the number of points around the object. My dog William (on the left) shows a tight image with high tolerance, while on the right there is loose choke and low tolerance.
While this is a handy tool, I do not find it as functional as the Expand and Contract tools already in Photoshop, and Photoshop SC3's new Refine Edge command makes this option irrelevant.
Making a Mask in Mask Pro 4, Part I:
Besides having two paths to take (Selections or Masks), if you chose Masks you also have two options depending on whether your object has any transparency or not, or if there's any hair you want to work around. If there is any transparency, and you want the new background to show through any of your Masked item, than you want to play keep and toss with the colors on your image.
To start, select the image that you want to Mask. I chose a dragonfly that I had photographed a number of years ago.
Zooming into the tail to start, I use the green eyedropper from the Tool palette to keep and the red eyedropper to drop. [Whichever tool you have selected, if you press the Command key, you will have the other tool—another new feature in Mask Pro 4.] Besides the removal of the background, my camera's automatic sharpening was too aggressive, and Mask Pro 4 was going to help me on that issue as well by helping me remove the halo.
Once you've defined some basic ranges that you want to keep and toss, you select the Magic Brush, and as you wipe across your image, the kept colors remain and the Dropped colors are removed as seen below. [The checkerboard pattern you see is a default representation for invisibility, or a region of no pixels.]
The full power of this approach comes when you are working on an area which is semi-transparent to fully transparent. The occasional lost pixel is not going to be that big of a deal, but you can go back and refine as much as you chose.
When working with the Magic Brush, or any tool that can change size, Mask Pro has the best functionality of any program I've seen, but you need a mouse with a scroll wheel to use it; if you scroll toward you, the brush size decreases, and if you scroll away from you, the brush size increases. And it gets better...
If you hold the option key down and scroll toward yourself, the outer circle gets smaller, and if you scroll away from the you (as seen above), the outer circle gets larger. What the inner and outer circle represents is the softness of the brush. The softness of the brush will determine how hard and/or soft the edge on your selection will be. Lastly, if you press the Command key, you control the Threshold, and if you press the Command and Option key simultaneously and scroll, you control the Transition levels.
Now, if you are using a Wacom Tablet, one of the new features is dynamic hardness as you press down on your pen. You (obviously) cannot scroll with the Pen, but you can press the bracket keys "[" &"]" keys to resize or drag the triangle on the Tool Options to set the size and the Brush Edge. However, as you press down more firmly on the pen tip, the Brush Edge contracts down to the size of the Brush. Thus, by pressing more or less on the pen tip, you can change the hardness of the brush. This is a great advancement. Since it is so much easier to use a Wacom Tablet when drawing around objects, having the ready access to a dynamic brush is wonderful.
One of the new features in Mask Pro 4 is the addition of number values in the Tool Options. While this is nice to see, it is not possible to click into any field and enter numbers. As such, this is only for visual clues and not much else.
Below, you can see the power of Mask Pro and its use of colors to define what to keep and drop. The translucent wing showed some of the background, and using the Magic Brush allowed the background colors to be dropped while keeping the main colors of the wing. The few dropped pixels of the wing will not be seen in the final image as the dragonfly image was not a high resolution image to begin with.
As you continue around some objects, you find that your image blends into the background to a point at which you cannot distinguish between the two, and no matter how many colors you Keep or Drop, or what your Threshold is, you cannot Mask just your image out. Here's where using multiple tools can come in handy. At the upper wing tip, I used the standard Pen tool, cropped out a section that my eyes could discern (but Mask Pro could not), and removed the challenging section. Then, once that was done, I could continue using the Magic Brush.
One of the biggest catches with the whole Keep and Drop approach to Masking is that as you continue around your object, you're Keep and Drop lists get longer and longer. As this happens, it's very possible (and probable) that the same colors will end up on both lists. In addition, the longer the lists get, the slower Mask Pro works and can get to the point of complete cessation of movement. At that point, the only option you have is to completely drop all colors and restart the game of Keep and Drop.
This brings up my biggest wish for Mask Pro. There is no mechanism to sort any of the images in the Keep and Toss columns. There is a new window called "Keep/Drop Detail View" that places small swatches in two sides of the same window, letting you move one or more of the Keep over to the Drop side (and vise versa). But if you want to delete a color, you need to go back to the original Keep and Drop palettes, select an individual color and press the Delete key. You cannot work more than one color at a time unless you want to completely delete all colors in a set. If you were able to sort by hue, you could better see if you have inadvertently clicked on multiple copies of the same color, allowing you to delete those duplicates.
In addition, I found it very difficult to interact with the Transition and Threshold aspects of the brushes to adequately cope with variations on hues.
In Photoshop if you click on the Magic Wand tool, for example, there is an option in the Options Palette to change the Tolerance of how much "off" the item you click on can be (this setting can range from 0-255) and still select outside of that color. If you click on, say "10," that means that any color ten units above or below the thing you clicked on will also be selected (for a range of 21 units, 10 above and 10 below). But when I click on a color in Mask Pro, I am never really sure how how much variation I should try to achieve with the Threshold to keep or toss a color before I should go to the next step and simply add another color.
If you need to do subsequent clean up on an image (and unless you have a very clean edge all the way around the image, you will have to do clean up), one of the handy tools is the Chisel tool. If the Red square is frontmost on the bottom of the tool palette, you will be removing pixels, and if you get too aggressive and remove more than you need, you can flip to the Green square to be frontmost and replace the pixels. Like most of the tools, you can soften the edge so that you do not end up with hard edges on your final selection.
Anyhow, once the item is removed from the surroundings, you can then drag the final image into another image, or vice versa. Notice in the image below how the blue sky can easily be seen through the lower wings and between the legs. Also, notice how I removed the over-sharpening halo from around the tail.
Making a Mask in Mask Pro 4, Part II:
If there is nothing transparent in the final image, another area where using the Magic Brush and the Keep and Drop color scheme is very handy is when there is hair or other strands that you wish to keep. However, if there is a very complex set of colors to deal with, than it might be wise to use the Keep and Drop Highlighters. A good example of a very complex image can be seen below.
Here is one of my two Corgis, William. A brown dog on a brown floor. Separating this could easily be a nightmare, especially if you want to keep the hair separate.
What I found after some experimentation is that the Keep and Drop Highlighters did the best and most efficient job of keeping what I wanted and what I didn't.
The process is fairly quick and straightforward, you loosely draw around all of the colors that you want to keep with the Green Highlighter, and those colors that you want to Drop with the Red Highlighter. You then fill each region with a bucket of Keep and Drop and then click the close button on the window to start the process. Notice how I occasionally dragged deep into some regions to insure that I got the subtle colors of the toenails, nose and ears.
One of the nifty things about Mask Pro is that after you've processed the image, you can mix and match your processes to get the best final image. Below you can see that the fur under William's chin still holds some of the floor's colors.
By using the same Keep and Drop process used before, I can then take the magic brush on this very limited region and very easily remove the floor, as seen below.
The final image clearly shows how the fur is maintained and removed from the floor and walls. (And the floor and walls were removed from the fur.) For fun, I placed the final image against white to show off the detail and placed the image in a PhotoFrame, also from onOne software. See my review of PhotoFrame here.
Overall, I like Mask Pro very much. If you do a lot of selections, Mask Pro is an excellent addition to Photoshop, and it will be used often. The inclusion of a variety of well done tutorial movies as well as a Tip & Shortcut Palette are excellent additions and help the new user learn how to use a program that has many nuanced components. I strongly recommend Mask Pro for those that do not currently own the program.
However, if you already have Mask Pro 3, I have to say that the advantages for purchasing Mask Pro 4 become more limited. With the exception of a few new features, the functionality is not much different from what you had before. If you have an Intel Mac and need to update your plug-ins to be all Universal for the upcoming Photoshop, there is not question you need to update. If you are on a PC, the biggest draw might be support for the Wacom Tablet (which is a big draw for Mac users as well, but the Universal aspect is irrelevant to a PC user). There is no doubt that dragging a Highlighter around with a mouse cannot match the ease of the pen of a Wacom Tablet. However, beyond these few new features, there's not much new here. A good program isn't all that much better.
So, beyond Universal (which won't be available until around the time that PS CS3 ships) which makes this a must have upgrade, or the Wacom Tablet support (a very important update), there's not much here for those who already have Mask Pro 3.
___________ Gary Coyne has been a scientific glassblower for over 30 years. He's been using Macs since 1985 (his first was a fat Mac) and has been writing reviews of Mac software and hardware since 1995.
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