Photoshop, the noun, is also used as a verb as in "Yeah, I Photoshoped his head onto the carrot...." Making the selection of the item one wishes to place somewhere else has long been one of the arts of Photoshop. Mask Pro provides a new collection tools and techniques for this art. While Mask Pro will not replace the selection/masking capabilities in Photoshop, it will significantly add to one's repertoire of tools.

Mask Pro has some hard/fast distinctions between a selection and a mask. Specifically, a selection lets you isolate part of an image so that you can do something to that section in the original image. A mask, according to Extensis, is to remove everything except the selection so that all that's remaining in the image is just the part you want. In Photoshop one uses the Extraction Filter for this, and a selection or a mask could be used as a selection in Photoshop whereupon one can copy the selection from one image to place it in another. In fact, to completely muddle the linguistic waters here, Extensis has a whole extra process for making a Work Path from a Selection which is a fairly straight forward operation in Photoshop. I am going to guess that there may be some proprietary Photoshop nomenclature going on here that Extensis is doing what it can to avoid.

In Photoshop, the line between a selection and a mask is blurry. This is because you can flip between a selection and a mask simply by clicking on the Selection Tool or the Quick Mask Tool. This switches you from the infamous marching ants to a colored mask that you can brush on or off with white or black respectively. As you remove the red in the QuickMask mode, you increase the selection region in the Standard Mode. See below for Photoshop's selection and QuickMask views of a flower.

For many objects, this give-and-take distinction works just fine, such as the flower above. However, there are some items such as hair in the wind or a drinking glass where standard selection techniques become essentially impossible or wholly inadequate. For the former, one often just ignores the loose hairs that cannot be globally selected. For the latter, if you select a glass initially photographed in a dark room and you move it to a beach in the daylight, the glass will look just wrong. To overcome these challenges, Adobe added the Extract tool (found in the Filter Menu in Photoshop 7) which does a very good job with both conditions.

Initially, Mask Pro does not have the back and forth ability of Photoshop to go between a selection and a quick mask. Curiously, when selecting the Mask Pro plugin, one is supposed to make a distinction as to whether one is going to make a "selection" by selecting Extensis -> Mask Pro Select, or a "mask" via Extensis -> Mask Pro. I tried very hard to find what I couldn't do in one if I selected the other--I couldn't. The only exception to this is if you have something selected in Photoshop and choose to use the "Create Work Path" in Mask Pro instead of Photoshop, you would want to select Extensis -> Mask Pro Select -> Make Work Path.

Beyond that Extensis has gone out of there way to make sure you have a variety of ways to select Mask Pro. There are, in fact, three approaches to get into Mask Pro:

1. From the Extensis Menu (left of the Help Menu, created when you install any of the Extensis filters) -> "Mask Pro" or "Mask Pro Select."
2. Filter Menu -> Extensis -> "Mask Pro"
3. Select Menu -> Extensis -> "Mask Pro Select" or "Mask Pro Create Work Path."

To reiterate, it seems that you can use the Select features of Mask Pro if you select Mask Pro and you can the Mask features if you select Mask Pro Select. (Gosh I hope that makes sense.)

Due to the nature of what Mask Pro does to a layer, it cannot do anything to a Background layer. As such, you must either duplicate the background layer and work on the copy or double-click the background layer and let it be "Layer 0."

Making a mask with Mask Pro is generally easy. Once you open the image in Mask Pro's window, you take the green marker and draw a line around everything you want to keep. Once you have a continuous line, you press the Command key which turns your marking pen into a paint bucket and you fill the confined region. Then you select the red marking pen to select everything you want to drop. Then press the Command key to fill in everything beyond that unbroken line. Below you see just before I was about to fill in the red. (The Mask Pro Tools are placed in this image so you can see the collection.) You should keep the drawn line as close to the edge as you can, but if you go over you can easily press the Option key which turns the Marking pen into a Marking eraser and you can undo with either color as you go along.

Once you are done you select the Magic Brush (the brush with the pixie dust stars) and go to the Edit menu and "Apply Tool to All." What's left is a very nice selection.

But it's not likely to be perfect. Here Mask Pro has some very nice solutions to resolve any problems. New with version 3 is the Chisel Tool (to the left of the drip in the Tool Palette above).

It is common in selections like this to have some region of the selection to have some rough areas. With the Chisel Tool, one selects how much effect it is going to have and one "clicks" in the problem region. Pixels are then flicked away. As can be seen in the images below, on the left is a problem region, in the middle the Chisel Tool in action, and on the right is the final result.

You can set this tool to remove (or add) a pixel layer at a time or be more aggressive. The one danger with the Chisel Tool is that you are likely to be so amazed at how nifty a job it does at removing thin layers of pixels, you may be inclined to do more than necessary. Hail the undo - Command-z (or with Mask Pro, it's Shift-Command-z to undo a brush stroke).

If you have a halo of light or dark pixels around your selection, one can safely and efficiently remove the halo with the Chisel Tool. I was impressed. There is another way to deal with these halos on some Masking operations discussed later on with the Magic Brush.

Another tool Mask Pro technique utilizes the eyedropper (seen at the top in the Tool selections, both green and red). These are used when you want to specifically point out to Mask Pro which colors you want to keep and which you want to drop. Each time you click on a color, you see the sampled colors in the respective Keep and Drop palettes.

Once you have sample a good respective amount of colors, you can take the Magic Brush and drag across the boundary of what you want to keep and what you want to be removed. As you can see, this works very well or rather disappointingly. It mostly depends on how well you have properly sampled the Keep and Drop colors. If there was a major region of problems, one can take the regular Brush, and paint with Restore or with Remove to fine tune your results.

Let me digress one bit on Mask Pro's Brushes and Marking Pens. I hope I hope I hope that Adobe uses these as prototypes for future tools in Photoshop. They are wonderful and their execution is brilliant.

A minor digression from my digression: most if not all your favorite key commands from Photoshop have been ported over to Mask Pro. Space Bar for hand, "z" for zoom, Option-z for magnify out and the bracket keys "[" & "]" for smaller and bigger brush sizes as well. One of the things I noticed when using the bracket keys was how nice and smooth the brush sizes increased or decreased in size. There was just something about it that was different and smoother. Then, during my reading the manual (a PDF, sigh...) I read that one can change the size of a brush by either:

• "Moving the slider in the Tool Option palette (see the Tool Option Palette to the right here)
• Use the left and right arrow keys
• Use the wheel on your mouse if your mouse has a wheel."
• (Notice that Extensis doesn't even mention the bracket keys--don't know why.)

Well, it just happens that I own a Kensington Pocket Mice (the kind with the retractable cord) and it has a wheel.

I can't tell you how wonderful it is to change the size of a brush by simply rolling that darn wheel. This is so great that if you do not have a wheeled mice, you should go out right now and buy one just so you could use it on this program.

But it gets better.

Notice in the Tool Options Palette to the right, there is not only Brush Size, but Brush Edge. The edge is larger than the brush size and represents the amount of gradation before full opacity is reached. (If you look at the archway image above, you will see two concentric circles. The inner circle is the Brush Size while the outer circle is the Brush Edge.) This is sort of like the difference between the fuzzy brushes and hard edge brushes in Photoshop, but here you can increase or decrease the amount of fuzziness on the fly by simply pressing the Option key as you spin the wheel back and forth.

But it gets better.

If you look at the Tool Options Palette, you see two other parameters: Transition and Threshold (these two options are for the Magic Brush as the normal Brush only has Brush Edge and Brush Size). Threshold lets you vary the amount of similarity between colors/shades before any given color is kept or dropped as you stroke an area with the Magic Brush. A soft Transition is good for subtle edges like hair or glass while a hard transition is good for bands of colors. And, Threshold can be varied by simply holding the Command key while spinning the wheel and Option-Command-wheel lets you control the Transition.

Does it get any better than this?

Well, a little. Notice the option to "Use color decontamination" at the bottom of the Tool Options? This lets Mask Pro favor the "keep" color over the "Drop" color. That way, if there is an anti-aliased color that favors the drop color, it will be dropped and you won't have a ring of near-dropped color around the saved item. You don't need to use this, but you can with a simple click.

Oh yeah, one more thing.

When using most of the tools, one will see a red and green square at the bottom of the Tool Palette. Green is for Restore what has been removed while Red is for Remove. When you use the Magic Brush, a third square shows up that is Red and Green. When using the Magic Brush, if you are trying to dial in the best combination of size, edge, transition, and threshold (and if you didn't change the squares from the red/green default) you do not have to undo what you just did as you go over and over any given area. That is, if you went over some hair and the transition was too hard, you can soften the transition and go over the area you just did and restore what you "over" removed without having to undo.

But the overriding important thing here has to be "How good does Mask Pro do?"

To the right is the "hair test." The top image is the original image of a young woman's hair with a few wispy strands. Selecting hair like this for placement in another image is sort of a holy grail. To compound the challenge here is the very subtle chicken-wire like cast on the right side of the image.

In the middle is the result with using Mask Pro. Its pluses were that not only could I vary how much hair I could bring out, but that I could vary this from one side of the head to the other depending on the how the conditions behind the head varied. The minuses with Mask Pro is that finding the right combination of what to vary and how it can be time consuming and potentially frustrating. I also found that the more I futzed with the settings, the worse the selection got. The manual does not cover the subtle aspects of how to deal with hair and was of no help.

On the bottom you see what resulted from using Adobe's Extract Command. On the plus side, it did a fine job and was fairly fast to use. The minus is that you have relatively little flexibility to fine-tune the results. Notice on the right side some of the hair was removed that shouldn't have been.

In short, I found Mask Pro 3 good. On some tasks I found it wonderful and other times I found it OK. The whole thing with Photoshop (in general) is that the longer you use it and the better you get, the more experience you have to know which tool to use and how to use that tool better. Simply put, Mask Pro provides more tools that you will need to take time to learn how to use effectively. They are good tools, but they are not magic.

On a side note, if I'm right and there is no real difference between choosing Mask Pro Select or Mask Pro, I wish Extensis would drop one or the other. If I'm wrong, I wish Extensis would make it more obvious what I can and cannot do in one or the other if the wrong one is selected. As it is, it is very confusing.

What Mask Pro offers is more tools to assist the user in the art of extraction. I would have loved a paper manual that was more extensive, and more tutorials covering a greater range of real-life experiences. Perhaps Extensis might consider requesting problem images from users, creating tutorials on how to best do the selection or masking, and posting these on their web site.

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