Vertus Fluid Mask: Cut out images like a duck to water

Edvarcl Heng | Mar 19, 2007

One of the favorite tricks that camera-toting dads like to fiddle with, is to change a picture of the kids at the beach to them spacewalking in their swimwear. But there's a lot of hard work involved, like painstakingly lassoing the kids' outline in a photo-editing program before deleting the background of the beach and swapping it with outer space. And when it comes to perfect outlining, it can take hours, especially when there are a gazillion individual hair strands to etch around.

So imagine our incredulous gasps, when we saw a demonstrator load a portrait shot of a shaggy-haired man in a forest into Photoshop, and wiped out the background with some quick strokes of a brush tool. It looked brilliant. The software is Fluid Mask and it is available as a plug-in only for Adobe Photoshop programs at the moment. According to Steve Nelson, marketing manager for Vertus, Fluid Mask is able to make short work of masking as it analyzes pictures in three ways: By contrast, color and pixel edges. "In fact, it helps the computer look at pictures the way the human eye does," he added.

During a software demo, Fluid Mask first evaluated and mapped out areas in a picture with similar properties. Next, the user moves a brush over the mosaic to delete most of the background. Finally, another brush tool is broadly traced over the general edge of the subject to be isolated. The software will then process the final image and remove the background right up to the edge. The result? Even at 600x magnification, we could see that hair strands were finely outlined. Impressive.
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