Mask Pro 3

Mask Pro 3, Extensis' solution for creating cutouts in Photoshop, looks like quite a substantial release, with a host of ingenious new features for making cutouts simpler. In reality, the process of making masks remains very much the same - choose colours to keep, choose colours to remove and start using the masking tools on offer to make your cutout.

This tool remains surprisingly easy to use. No, it doesn't have the simplicity of Extract in Photoshop, but it offers much more control over your masks. Immediately obvious as new to Mask Pro on boot-up is the context-sensitive Tool Options palette. This enables you to quickly adjust tool options, depending on the tool you've selected. This is, as we've said, an immediately obvious addition to the workspace. What's not so obvious, but probably more important, is the major tweaking of the Keep and Drop Highlighter tools.

Mask Pro now uses Keep and Drop areas. What this means is that, as well as being able to accurately pinpoint coloured pixels to drop, you can now drag across an area that contains a certain amount of colours you wish to bin - speeding up the whole masking process. The Keep and Drop tools are for defining colours to keep or bin when using Mask Pro's main tools - the Magic Brush or Magic Wand. The former enables you to paint on a mask - all colours being ignored or deleted as you go. The wand works like Photoshop's Magic Wand, only it takes the colours into consideration. If you select no keep or drop colours, the Brush tool will do its best to accurately follow defined areas - but this method isn't recommended because results are inconsistent.

You work in either Restore, Erase or Dual mode with the brushes, and how these modes operate is pretty self-explanatory. In Restore mode, you add back to the object you're masking; in Erase mode, you delete from it. Dual mode enables you to work with the brush, keeping or deleting from your mask as defined by your currently selected Keep or Drop colours.

Edge-defining used to be one of Mask Pro's problems - as with all masking tools and methods, there was often a slight halo left around the image after compositing. This has been partly rectified by the Chisel and Blur tools. The former is actually quite neat - very easy to use and capable of deleting offending pixels around your mask very quickly. The Blur tool enables you to feather edges to create better composites
- and again is easy enough to use. Colour Decontamination technology is here; when checked, the option does its job, removing halos from masks automatically.

Overall, Mask Pro provides a powerful solution for making complex selections and masks. Of course, the more complex the selection, the more work you're going to have to put in - Mask Pro isn't a miracle- worker. What it can do, however, is intelligently remove underlying colours, leaving you with layers ready for clean composites.