In exasperation at trying to mask a very complicated shape against a very complicated background earlier, I found myself looking at the reviews of the various masking plug-ins available. I may buy Fluid Mask 2, but the steep price tag and short maintenance window are off-putting, and I'm not sure I'd get my money's worth.
This hunting around led me to GrowCut. Click here
for the home page.
I've installed the Mask 1.1 package on my machine, and got exactly the result I was looking for with Photoshop after about an hour of careful adjustment. Once you work out how GrowCut works, it's easy to use. I suspect it won't do all masking tasks - for example, it will probably not mask hair against a background, but I'm very happy with the results I've got on this one image.
It's a bit crude, in that it only works in 8 bit mode and reduces the layer you're working on to a mask. I simply made a copy of the layer in a fresh document, reduced it to 8 bit, produced the mask, then copied it back into an alpha channel in my original 16 bit document. If you get the results you want, it's worth the 30 seconds of messing around to get the mask into your document.
As always, you can touch up the mask later with the brush and similar tools.
I'd be interested in other people's results.
David
