Fluid Mask 3.0

What’s the best way to extract an object from its background? Of all Photoshop’s native masking solutions – Quick Mask, tonal masks, the Extract filter and the rest – purists favour the Lasso or Pen tools. But for most of us, such methods require far too much time and effort to use regularly. Like Corel’s KnockOut and onOne Software’s Mask Pro, Vertus’ Fluid Mask has been a true boon for digital designers of all levels, making the job far faster and less fiddly.

Fluid Mask operates as a true plug-in: it’s accessed through the Filters menu and offers its own set of tools in a new workspace. Limiting the size of the working window sometimes causes confusion, but this is just a niggle.

Fluid Mask offers multiple sets of tools applicable to different tasks. The Delete Local and Keep Local brushes are the most straightforward – and, from experience, the most heavily used. They’re essentially uncomplicated colour blockers. When you specify which colours to keep and which to delete, all contiguous areas that contain those colours are masked off.

The advantage of this method over, say, the Magic Eraser tool in Photoshop is that rather than blocking the colour selection and automatically deleting or keeping it, the selection is just masked. This unlocks a myriad of creative possibilities – such as duplicating the mask into a pattern, or tightening the crop should any loose pixels still be apparent.

But such features were always available in Fluid Mask, and here they just operate much more quickly and robustly. New to 3.0 is Localized Edge Detection and Blending, which essentially takes masking precision to new levels by automatically detecting rough edges and suggesting alternative edge detection settings for particularly problematic areas. Such a technique was available manually in previous versions, but including it as an automated option here really lifts the app.

Also refined is the Edge Blending option, where the app calculates the width of the edge automatically and sets masking and blending fidelity to suit. You can then tweak these edges via Feather Blending or Smart Blending – or even a mix of both – which results in some truly brilliant masking of even the most complex image area.

This is a fine update to a great tool, which, if anything, suffers only from the preceding versions’ completeness. Compared to MaskPro and Corel’s KnockOut, it offers a faster, more intuitive feature set, though you do pay a slight premium for it. There are few outright new features, but those that are new, are perfectly honed for digital designers.