My review of 3 masking softwares for image masking in Photoshop

As you know starting up www.texturefly.com in the last few months has been alot of work. We now have over 70 images in our texture store and growing strong.

In my journey to find the best possible methods of creating the highest quality masked images for 3d rendering and architectural illustration, I tried out 3 different masking programs. Fluid Mask3 by Veritus, EZmask v1.5 and  MaskPro by OnOne.  My goal was to cut out a tree with each program, since trees would be the most difficult .

Fluid Mask 3- Initially I started out with the trial of Fluid Mask 3. A nice program but seemed a little overkill for me.  My favorite feature was the histogram where you could select colors by selecting an area on the histogram. I liked this for isolating sky. This program works on the principal of keeping colors and deleting colors then using the blend between both areas. My tree edges weren’t looking as crisp as I’d like and I did have some computer bog down. It was a little bit more difficult to master as well.

EZMask 1.5 – Because this trial would not let you save back into photoshop,  It was hard to see the result with this software. Boasting to be very low on user input, you can basically paint the border of the foreground or image to keep and a border the background. It somehow analyzes pixels and determine the border. I found the boarder rough and I could not even get close to getting a decent tree image cut out. I didn’t  spend a lot  of time on this because the trial was limiting but the time I did spend, I wasn’t impressed.

MaskPro 4.1 by OnOne – What can I say about this masking program except… love it! This program is everything I needed, with the built in link for tutorials it took me maybe 20 minutes to learn it enough where I can use it to cut out a tree proficiently. Using the same keep/delete palette idea, this one lets you airbrush as you go so that you can select certain colors in areas and then go to another area and isolate those colors, you can also select the whole image which takes time to calculate and sometimes bogs down the computer. This program is easy to use yet detailed enough be able to manipulate controls to get the result you want.

I guess you can guess what the winner was… Mask Pro 4.1 A great masking program for creating all my Texturefly images.

Texturefly.com is on the rise.

masked acacia tree

It’s time to get ready to implement and in the very near future,  launch Texturefly.  Texturefly.com will be a premier online texture store that will specialize in masked images not only for those that are in architectural illustration and 3d rendering, but also those using  composite images in Photoshop as well as stock photos for web, advertising etc. Texturefly will start off with a section on masked trees and people, eventually  expanding to cars, plants and tileable textures. All images with be on a black or white background and masked using an alpha channel. All images will be sold individually at first then maybe when things get running we will have packages or bulk discounts. It will be set up so the end user can download the image directly after payment is approved though a download link.  If anyone has any requests or interests has any input to please feel free to comment on this blog.

http://www.texturefly.com