Vertus Fluid Mask

“I’m a professional photographer who has used every mask plugin known to man, all with varying levels of disappointment. I very cynically downloaded your trial of fluid mask… and thought I’d be proven right yet again. But I have to say that from the moment I revealed the cutout of a guy whose hair I had to extract from the background, I immediately went to your site and bought your product.”

“Fluid Mask is the best piece of software I’ve used for tackling complicated cut outs such as hair. In time, newspapers and magazines not using this technology may start to look dated and inferior in terms of the quality of their reprographics as more and more people start using Fluid Mask. Not only are the results outstanding, but this software actually saves time! A necessity to any deadline driven reprographics department“

(original posted by: Erik Vlietinck, Jul 15 2007)

Creating cut-outs for magazines or for the web is not an easy thing to do when the object you’re trying to cut out has hair or has details that interfere with a background (tree branches, for example). There are a number of cut-out help tools out there, that all make life a little easier, but if you want to get on with your life and not spend a whole afternoon making that mask perfect, you should give Fluid Mask 3 a try.

We’ve been following and covering Fluid Mask 3 since the two previous versions, and this is a Photoshop plug-in that has been improving ever since it came to market. With version 3, Fluid Mask’s developers, Vertus Technologies, have taken a step back in Mac OS X human interface compliance, but that doesn’t mean the program has become harder to use –quite the contrary, in fact. Much that you do when creating that cut-out, is automated in Fluid Mask’s workflow. And the results are nothing short of perfect. With Fluid Mask 3 you can create a perfect image object or cut-out in about a third of the time it takes with Photoshop or with competing products. [read full article...]

We didn’t want to miss out on all the fun so we’ve have decided to get some blogging action in. We intend to use this medium to post our technical/development news, Fluid Mask tutorials (static and video) sent in by members of the Vertus Team and our customers, plus general photographic / graphic industry news.

Hair Blending #1

Going by our customer support questions the biggest masking problem for everybody would seem to be cutting out hair from backgrounds. Here is where you’ll find out how Fluid Mask 3 can help you out with that!

Our guess is that you have at some point been tasked to drop in a new background behind a subject model with fine, fly away hair. Trust us you’re not the only one! We have put together a video tutorial for you to stream or download and watch in your own time. Click on the image below to check it out - you’ll be taken to our tutorials page where you’ll find more solutions to tricky masking problems - enjoy!

Click image to this watch video now!

We’ve been seen increased responses to our tutorials with some great requests - thanks for sending them in! So if there is a tutorial you would like to see please contact me directly - steve at vertustech.com and I will work on putting something together.

Thanks!
Steveo

Vertus is the graphics and imaging software division of Heligon, a technology business specializing in image data interpretation. Heligons ground breaking technology uses complexe algorithms to mimic the way the eye and brain perform visual processing so that complex shapes and colors can be recognized with images. Heligon licenses its technology to market leaders in industries including design and graphics, printing and video.