Erasing backgrounds in no time – Extraction plugins for Photoshop

By Dirk Metzmacher

Photoshop offers you a number of techniques for extracting elements from an image, but they all have one thing in common: They take a lot of time. Especially when it’s about hair or half-transparent objects like smoke or glass, plugins can be a valuable help and noticeably reduce work time.

EZ Mask

After starting it up, EZ Mask presents itself in a very well-arranged window. Take note of the three pen tools in the toolbar to the left, which serve as a selection help: The first pen lets you mark the areas you want to extract, the second one lets you define those sections you want to discard, and the third one lets you paint over unclear spots such as smoke, glass, or reflections.

Alternatively, you could use the pens to circle areas and fill them with the paint bucket. With a click on the Process button you can witness the impressive live creation of the mask, before you can examine the result. If you’re not satisfied with how the image element has been selected, you can always go back, refine the selection with the marker pens, and examine your progress once more.

The preview quality can be adjusted as well. The higher the quality setting, the slower the preview refresh rate will be. A couple of zoom and positioning tools help you to navigate the image’s details in order to place your selections more precisely. When you’ve achieved your desired result, confirm the process with a click on the Done button.

Ultimatte AdvantEdge

The AdvantEdge software is not an extraction specialist per se, but a professional plugin for the so-called keying technique, where a person is shot in front of a homogeneous, single-colored background like a bluescreen or greenscreen, and then extracted from the image. This means that unsettled backgrounds can cause problems for this program. But if it’s about cleanly separating a background color including shadows from the main image object, you will achieve high quality results.

First off, define the background color, then use the color tolerance sliders to select any related colors that should be invisible as well, since no studio background conforms to a single RGB value. Filters can aid you in cleaning the material. Colored reflections on the object are neutralized as well. In addition, the edge of the mask can be reduced or blurred.

This makes AdvantEdge a specialist which is mainly focused on film creators, so it’s not only offered as a Photoshop version, but also as a universal plugin for Adobe, Apple, Avid, Eyeon and Autodesk. This all-inclusive package comes at three times the cost of the single Photoshop plugin, though.

Power Mask

Power Mask is from a company called Digital Film Tools, just like EZ Mask. The editing window is a lot larger here, though, and the number of available tools for image separation easily trumps that of its little brother EZ Mask. You can still discover its three marker pens and the paint bucket here.

What’s more, Power Mask comes with additional functions, such as a tool called Auto Paint that detects the outer and inner area when you trace contours. Simply put, this is a combination of the first two tools which allow you to paint over the foreground and background.

It’s very helpful that the mask, which the program calculates from your input, is instantly displayed. The paint bucket equivalent is called Auto Fill here, and this allows an intelligent fill after selecting. The preview options like foreground, background, mask, combination or a function called Trimap with painted-in colors give you a good guess of whether the masking process has already been successful or if it still needs a little improvement. Usually though the edges are recognized very well on the first run – even in extreme cases like fine fuzz.

Eraser Genuine

Eraser Genuine is free. Of course this is not the only advantage of this plugin, but you’ll have to cut back in some areas in comparison to the competition. First you define two colors. The first color means something can be erased, the second marks elements that need to be kept. The plugin takes these two values, scans the document, and replaces erasable areas with transparencies.

Fine adjustment can be achieved with the opacity sliders, whose minimum and maximum control the softness and size of the transparent areas. So this software delivers good results especially for image files with few colors or hard transitions from the main image element to the background. In more complicated cases we’d advise against this program, since the post processing for complex objects takes at least as much time as extracting them without a plugin.

Mask Pro

Mask Pro’s interface presents itself almost like a little Photoshop, specialized on extraction. The left side has the toolbar, which contains the two extraction options that make this add-on so powerful: First, there’s the color pickers that let you include or exclude colors. Second, there are the masking pens which can be compared to Photoshop’s Extract function (which by the way is not integrated into Photoshop CS4 by default anymore, but it can be reinstalled as a plugin).

In addition to the most important tools you’ll get a magic wand, a path tool and a chisel. The name of the last tool alludes to chiseling the last pixels from the edge of an extracted object, which allows you to refine the transitions. Making for a convenient introduction, onOne offers a little video for each of these functions, as well as an appropriate list of keyboard shortcuts.

A dedicated palette on the right side lets you select the tool size and softness. Below that it shows the colors you chose with the color pickers to mark them as worth keeping or erasable, respectively. The clean interface will make you feel right at home due to its closeness to Photoshop. The color decontamination technology gives you great results in your montage, as it matches the extracted element to the new background.

SmartMask

SmartMask is divided into the modes Sharp, Soft, and Complex and presents the respective necessary tools. As the name suggests, Sharp mode is suited for extracting elements with a lot of contrast and hard edges that separate them from the background. Softer edges like hair or fur call for the Soft mode, and the Complex mode takes care of extreme cases such as glass or soap bubbles.

Using the application is a breeze: Take the keeping pen and roughly trace the contours of the object you want to select. The erasing pen tells the program which area to discard after the treatment. Ideally, you should follow the form of the image element that should be kept. Then, click on the Start button at the top right. The red areas are erased, the blue ones are kept, and the green color shows the transition at the edges.

The option panel allows you to preview the image element on top of a new background, and you can hide the colored areas and selections. If you’re not satisfied with the selection of the object, you can test several modes in combination. This way, even more difficult areas like hair can be very finely treated. For example, you could use the green pen to mark any area that is hard to define, use the eyedropper to select colors that should be kept, and use the magic brush on the background to keep or drop colors, respectively.

Primatte

Primatte is not an extraction tool for every case, and the developers themselves stress this point on their website. Much like AdvantEdge, this add-on is happy to work with single-colored backgrounds. Separating a person from a flower pattern wallpaper is probably going to be problematic for Primatte. But the software is a great solution for photographers who mostly shoot in a studio in front of a single-colored background, which can be cleanly separated even from fine hair or the flame of a candle.

The interface is rather unconventional: Diverse buttons are spread out over the entire screen around the document. The mask can be created either automatically or in three steps, by making a selection and then cleaning the foreground and background. In order to adapt the lighting conditions of the extracted image to those of the new background, Primatte gives you the Light Wrap Controls.

The Tune Controls and the functions under Fix Detail take care of clean transitions. Different views like a mask or the view of a foreground after processing allow you to examine the result in-program. Another very useful feature is the Remove Noise button which helps you reduce image noise.

Fluid Mask

Much like Mask Pro, Fluid Mask appears like a little Photoshop for extraction work: On the left side you’ll find a toolbar, the right side has the palettes and above the image window there’s an option panel for the tools. Beneath the standard tools there are sometimes further tool variations. Most notably the add-on surprises with an automatic enhancement of the hardest edges in the image. You can influence these lines with the Edge palette by adjusting the number of edges and a threshold. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work in real time, and needs to be confirmed with the Apply button after every single change.

Then you select all the areas in the image that you want to keep or drop. You have three tools for that, each in two variations, that allow you to edit the document from very finely to very roughly. First you should use the Keep Exact brush to trace fine details like the fingers of a hand, followed by the Keep Local brush that is used to select the body. Large surrounding areas call for the Delete Global brush, which allows you to very quickly fill in areas that have already been defined by the edges.

Additional tools help you to define areas more exactly. You can edit transitional edges with the Eraser. The tools for rectangular or multiangular correction areas and for a forced edge help in selecting very difficult spots. The color changer selects similar colored areas, the detail preview is especially interesting for large documents, and the cleaning tool fills gaps in larger mask areas – all in all a good range of diverse specialists that greatly speed up your extraction jobs.