Fluid Mask 3
Fluid Mask is an easy way to remove/replace background images. People use this when they want to extract people or objects out of photograph.
This is a professional graphic tool that is more powerful than mask functionality that you may encounter in Pixelmator or Photoshop. This gives the user more power to strip out unwanted backgrounds. The net-net results is a cleaner cut with no ugly pixelated edges.
Some example uses:
- Change the background from a cloudy day to a nice sunny one.
- Add someone to a photograph to make it appear that they were at the family outing even though they couldn't make it.
- Take the 'Welcome to Boston' sign out of a picture and place it on your website header.
- Remove unwanted objects from your photos.
- An tool in your photography toolbox to create great images for social media.
From their website:
Good Tools have a Learning Curve
It takes a while to understand how to use this tool. Fortunately, there are plenty of video tutorials to watch and understand the fundamental ideas. Every image is different so learning the fundamentals can help tackle the toughest task.
I did find the layout to be a bit hard to understand but watching the videos and playing around with the software help with the learning curve.
Start off slow. I would recommend just doing a basic background replacement and slowly work your way to more complex masking.
Some Examples of Work
Here are a couple of images that I was able to extract using Fluid Mask.
A little touch up with Pixlr to keep the colors about the same.
Getting Fluid Mask
You don't need Photoshop to use Fluid Mask. It works perfectly fine as a stand alone application. The downside of the standalone version is you can't drag and drop images to open - you need to open the image via the File -> Open option within the application.
You can download a trial version from their website. If you find the tool to be a time saver you can purchase a license for $99.
This might seem a bit expensive for the casual photographer and blogger. However, the tool will save you a lot of time which could justify