Indeed, one of the most difficult things to do in Photoshop is to mask out stuff you don't want. That all changed with Extensis' MakePro and its taken a quantium leap with MaskPro 2.
   We refer you to our original review on MaskPro for some of the details, but version 2 of this absolutely fabulous program is well worth the upgrade. Why? Two words: Intellibrush and Intelliwand.
   The original version of this program allowed you to select keep and drop colors. You merely clicked on color areas you wanted to keep and color areas you wanted to drop. Then, using a magic brush, you traced along the border between the two colors and MaskPro took out what you wanted to drop and kept what you wanted to retain.
   Those features are still a very valuable part of MaskPro 2 and work better than ever. Mask anything? Yes you can!
   But version 2 has an easier way. Just click with the Intellibrush or the Intelliwand on the color you want to get rid of and drag along the border. That is about as simple as it can be. And, if there is a mistake, you just backspace to remove the background removal (which you can do with all of MaskPro's effects).
   How well does this work? It'll mask out the background between the hairs on a lion's chiny-chin-chin. It just doesn't get any better than that.
   But it does. A new Edge Blender eliminates the "halo effect" you sometimes get with masks of different colors and new Precision Edge technology is more accurate than ever before. All in all, MaskPro 2 is a worthy successor to MaskPro 1 – which was and is light years ahead of anything else in masking technology.
   However, MaskPro 2 has one other feature worthy of praise. That is its ability to generate clipping paths easily, effectively and without causing your typesetter to die of overwork.
   For the uninitated, you use a clipping path when you wish to merely outline an object. Without the clipping path, even though you erase the background, you still retain the whole image – the background is just an invisible color. Try doing a montage without a clipping path and you'll go crazy in short order.
   The problem with clipping paths is that, if they follow the outline of the object very accurately, they can become immensely complex. As the complexity increases, so do the demands on a typesetter. If your clipping paths are too complex, the typesetter just gives up the ghost.
   MaskPro 2 uses vector-based clipping paths which make it easier for a typesetter to handle. How well does this work? I recently did a montage with five pictures and the typesetter at the office thrwew up its hands and quit. We sent the same file to a service bureau with a much newer typesetter. Same result.
   Fortunately, MaskPro 2 arrived the next day. The resultant clipping path worked on the typesetter at the office without a hitch! Certainly worth the price of the software all by itself. And the client thought so, too.

   Link to the Extensis web site.