Mask Pro

One of the most difficult things to do when you are working with graphics is to cut the part of the picture you want from the part you don't want. Photoshop (and other programs) have "magic masks" to help you do this, but if you have ever tried on anything somewhat difficult, you know it does not always work well. The result: sometimes hours of editing single pixels to get it just right.
Enter Extensis MaskPro. It is so easy to mask out stuff you don't want that you should run, not walk, to the Extensis web site and order it. No fooling.

Look at the picture at the right. Its a not-very-good GIF of the Lincoln Memorial. Here is the problem, the sky in the background has all sorts of colors in it, some of them very similar to the colors of the Memorial itself. By the same token, the space between the two leftmost columns is "open" to the sky, so it has to be taken out, too.
   Try this with magic mask first. You'll see that, no matter how you adjust the range, it either overlaps the Memorial or leaves out parts of the sky.
   Now try it with the freehand mask tool. Lotsa luch. You can get it close with a very steady hand, but not perfect. And if you are doing work which you really want to be right, it has to be pretty near perfect.
   Let's run MaskPro. You have one eyedropper for the colors you want to keep. Just run the dropper down one of the Memorial's columns. There is another eyedropper for colors you want to get rid of. Run it through the sky.
   Now, take the Magic Painbrush and run it around the edge of the Memorial. Run it between the columns. That's what the illustration above shows: MaskPro gets rid of the colors you don't want and keeps those you do. Time to do this was about 30 seconds!
   Once you have done this, just apply it back to Photoshop. And here you have two options. You can just use the image as if you had done this work directly in Photoshop, or you can create a path.
   The advantage to the path is that when you have one, you can import the graphic into another application and it will be transparent around the visible parts of the image rather than as a square or rectangle (see your PhotoShop documentation). This is a real bonus.
   The magic paintbrush can be adjusted as to size and the amount of hardness of the tip, making your cutouts blend in better. There are also other tools, including some which mimic those in PhotoShop itself, but more finely tuned. You can even cut out strands of hair. The program is that good.
   Extensis MaskPro is a must purchase if you do any work at all with cutouts.

Link to the Extensis Web site