For the years I’ve been loving the best masking tool on the market called ReMask by Topaz Labs. Here’s my old review that I first published in 2011, and I’ve only come to love it much more over the years.
The hardest thing I find myself doing in photo editing is creating complex masks. I’ve got an arsenal of tricks up my sleeve, but it is just downright tricky sometimes getting a good mask. This is a product which like onOne Software’s Mask Pro tries to make the job easier than all the cool tricks Scott Kelby teaches in his book The Photoshop Channels Book.
To see how it works, check out the window below that shows the basics. What you do is put a blue line around the edges that separate the keep from remove areas and then fill those areas with the paint bucket once you are done. The cool thing is that you can be a little sloppy and it usually figures it out fairly well.
Mark your boundaries in Blue and then fill Green to Keep and Red to Remove
ReMask in Action
A demo is worth a thousand words, so let me just show you how I used it most recently.
I was running out the door with my daughter to our first ever father-daughter dance when I decided we should get a quick picture together. I had just configured my lighting setup but I hadn’t worked the kinks out, so when we snapped a few quick shots the background sucked. I figured with a white background it would be easy to swap backgrounds, but it ended up being much harder than thought because of our hair (isn’t that always the case). I decided to give ReMask a try so I watched a video and followed the instructions carefully for my photo as you can see below:
The initial result was great but there was still a little extra work to do for the hair. The video had showed how to do this so I watched it again as well as this great video I found on YouTube:
The dual color selection trick shown at the end of the video was just the ticket to get the results I needed for some of the tough areas. Here’s a before and after where I’ve put in a new background from PhotoFrame to replace the ugly white background (mouse in and out to see before and after):
A Proper Winter Dance Background
For My Princess
I was pretty jazzed with the results so I have been using it more often lately like when I did this shot recently:
Mouse over (or click on iOS) to see the before shot
Once again, a big improvement!
Here’s one more example where you can hover in and out to see the TriMap and Mask from an article I did on InFocus:
Hover over to see the TriMap from this photo featured in my InFocus review
Conclusion
When it comes to saving time editing photos, nothing is more useful than things that keep you from having to mask fine edges yourself. This is why ReMask is a great investment and a heck of a value for its low price (under $70 – before my blog discount).
I’m a big fan of ReMask and its new dual color selection feature is very powerful for difficult things like hair, veils, trees, etc… Download the demo and try it out for yourself!
Special Offer
Topaz Labs is a long-time partner of this blog so you can get a 15% discount like always on the Discount Coupon Code page. It’s the best deal on the web and it helps to support his blog, so we both win when you purchase using the links here.
50% Discount Until October 31st, 2013
Click here and use the code octremask until October 31st, 2013 and you’ll get 50%. Once this offer expires, resume using my Topaz Labs discount on my Discount Coupon Code page.
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Disclosure
If you make a purchase using links found in this article, I may make a commission.
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