Review: Extensis Mask Pro 3

Product Name: Mask Pro 3
Company: Extensis
URL: http://www.extensis.com/maskpro/
Category: Adobe Photoshop Plug-in
Price:
- $199.95 Full Version
- $99.95 Upgrade from previous versions of Mask Pro
  (Serial Number Required)
Requirements:
- Mac OS 9.2.2, or Mac OS X (v. 10.1.5 and higher)
- Adobe Photoshop 6.0.1, or 7.0.1 and higher
- Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0
- PowerPC G3 or higher processor
- 64 MB minimum application RAM (for use with Photoshop 6.0.1)
- 128 MB minimum application RAM (for use with Photoshop 7.0.1 and higher or Photoshop Elements 2.0).
Rating: 3.5 bounces - Lustworthy and then some

Mask Pro 3 box

Masking for the Mask Challenged.

After spending a little time with Mask Pro 3, I became acutely aware of two things: Mask Pro contains some very nice enhancements for creating masks and extracting images from backgrounds; and for someone who is already adept at using the Photoshop masking tools, it's more of a luxury than a necessity.

Mask Pro 3 is a mature and robust plug-in for Photoshop that really does make it fairly straightforward to remove unwanted backgrounds and extract foreground objects and people. Once you have opened an image in Photoshop, you can use Mask Pro to either make a selection or a mask, provided the image is on a separate layer or you have quickMask mode enabled.

Mask Pro launches on top of Photoshop, and provides new toolbars and palettes for masking and selecting. The selection of tools is a little daunting at first, but they are easy enough to learn.

The WorkSpace

Click for a full-res preview of the MaskPro Workspace (157 K)

The tools on the right hand side are easy to learn and fairly simple to use, except erasing using the option key takes a lot of adjustment. Most of the palette space is used storing keep and drop colors.

The MaskPro workspace is fairly self explanatory and easy to learn. The handiest tools in Mask Pro are the Keep and Drop eyedroppers and highlighters. Simply put, they allow you to select areas and colors to keep or drop. The image I initially chose to mask had both good and bad points when it came to using Mask Pro - good contrast between the foreground figure and background, but with blue areas inside the foreground figure.

I gave the image a quick once-over with the Keep eyedropper, selecting the colors inside the figure and snowboard. Then I hit the sky blues with the Drop eyedropper. After this, it was a simple matter of clicking with the Magic Brush tool in the background to blast out all the background blue. This 2 minute procedure had fairly impressive results, but did not quite result in a finished mask.

Using the drop and keep eyedroppers gave me a quick and "dirty" mask. (preview: 340 K)

This looked pretty good, so I magic wanded (a new verb for Photoshop users!) out the "interior" blue background areas under the legs and arm to remove those blue areas. I hit Apple+S to save the mask and jump back into Photoshop and dropped a gray background layer behind my snowboarder layer to get a good sense of how well the mask worked. Unfortunately, the mask had a bright blue halo around the entire figure.

The icky blue halo that surrounded the entire figure - shown here at 200%.

Chiseled Features

So far, I had invested about 5 minutes in this mask, so I was still "ahead" by using Mask Pro instead of my trusty Wacom and normal Photoshop layer masking. Unfortunately, I still needed to get rid of that nasty little halo surrounding the snowboarder - so I relaunched Mask Pro. Thankfully, Mask Pro was kind enough to remember my keep and drop values - so I picked up the chisel tool, experimented with size and chisel amount for a few minutes, and then proceeded to drag the chisel around the entire figure.

This is where I should mention my frustration with "undo" inside Mask Pro. Even if you use a long stroke with a tool, an undo in Mask Pro might only amount to a very small section of that stroke. This might have some effect on the RAM usage of Mask Pro, which I only mention because within 4 or 5 strokes of finishing, Mask Pro and Photoshop crashed with no error message - just poof, and I was back to square one. I relaunched Photoshop, and basically started over again. I should mention I believe this is the first time I have seen Photoshop 7 crash since the beta release.

Needless to say, I recommend saving often while using Mask Pro. Unfortunately, this means applying masks frequently, saving in Photoshop, and then relaunching Mask Pro.

So after working back to this stage, and getting more or less exactly the same results, I was ready to chisel down the image again. After a lot of chiseling and saving, chiseling and saving - I arrived at a pretty darn good mask.

Much better - still a little blue, but much better.

The Verdict

Crashing aside, Mask Pro is a really decent masking tool, but it does have it's limitations. The more complex the background is, the more time you can count on spending in Mask Pro. Having foreground colors in the background will defintely require more time to fix, and at a certain point, might be more easily addressed by pros in normal layer masking.

Monochrome images are also a nightmare in general to mask, and Mask Pro is going to have difficulty when the keep and drop colors are essentially tints and shades of the same color. Count on spending some quality time with the keep and drop highlighters in more complex images. Short of living in that crazy high-tech world that is only present in Hollywood fiction - there are no easy ways for instant masking - but Mask Pro does make some major improvements to Photoshop's masking tools.

Because of the instability I encountered on two systems with several images, I'm deducting a half-bounce (which will totally annoy my editor who hates half-bounces) from the score. Without seeing Photoshop collapse several times, I would have awarded a four-star rating to Mask Pro 3.

Systems tested: Dual 1GHz G4 tower with Photoshop 7.0.1 and 1.5 GB RAM, 17inch PowerBook G4 with 512 RAM and Photoshop 7.0.1. On both systems iTunes 4.01 was running in the background.

-Joel Davies

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