#Topaz remask tutorial for vail software#
#Topaz remask tutorial for vail Pc#

It only took a few quick strokes to do this. In the next image you will see that I have cleaned up the mask around the legs and feet considerably. You are not limited to looking at your mask while you refine, the five buttons at the top of the window - 'Image', 'Trimap', 'Mask', 'Keep', and 'Cut', allow you to look at those views and the effect of your last brush stroke on each.

#Topaz remask tutorial for vail software#

The software understands that you are pointing out an area where there is too much (use the red brush) or too little (green brush) white in your mask. The secret is to use a small brush and just make little strokes in the general area that you want to refine. I mostly use the keep and cut brushes to refine the mask to look like the original subject. The meanings of these brushes are pretty clear - paint with the green brush where you want to keep more, the red brush where you want to cut more, and the blue brush where you want the software to try harder at finding the edge. There are three basic brushes - 'keep' (green), 'cut' (red), and 'compute' (blue). I'm only going to discuss the basic brushes, but will briefly describe the singe and dual color brushes. If you look at the tools on the left of the screen, you will see some brushes. They have given us tools to fine-tune our mask and make quick work of doing so. As you can see, the mask isn't perfect and could use some cleaning up. Here we see the initial results of the mask creation. Now that we have defined our background and foreground, we can click on 'Compute' (in the tool panel on the left) and let the software work on the mask. Notice that there is a message at the bottom of the window that says 'Fill over the area that you want to cut'. All that is left is to click in the area between the legs. Here I have clicked on the background above and below the bird. We will use this to fill the areas that we want to cut with red. Go to the tools panel on the left and select the red bucket. We are now ready to make the initial mask.

Note that I have also painted the area between the feet where I want to eliminate the background. Here you can see that I have painted the entire area that I want to define as the edge of my mask. If you really mess up and want to backtrack, there is good old 'control Z' (command Z on a Mac). If you stray from the edge too far with your brush, just go back and paint in the part you missed, it will just add to what you have already painted. Notice that there is a message at the bottom of the window that says 'Brush over the area that you want to compute.' Move the cross-hair part of the brush along the edge to get as close to half background/half foreground as you can.

I am also going to include the branch, as I want that to be part of my foreground. Here you can see that I have started to paint around the edges of the bird.

This brush is selected automatically when you open the filter, so you just need to size your brush appropriately and start painting along the outer edges of your subject. We do this by using the 'compute' brush, which we will use to paint a blue path along our subject to tell the filter where we want it to look for edges. What we want to do is define the areas that we want to delete, leaving only our subject. This is the area that the filter is going to keep. When the image is opened in ReMask, the entire image shows a green overlay. The next step is to select the Topaz ReMask 3 filter from the list. You do not want to have the layer mask selected or the filter won't work. Be sure you click on the image thumbnail of the layer before proceeding. Add a layer mask to this layer by clicking on the layer mask icon at the bottom of the layers palette. You can do this by dragging the layer to the 'new layer' icon at the bottom of the layers palette. As a matter of routine, I always make aД¬opy of the original layer. Would like to replace it completely with a different one. I have opened the image and we can see the problem - the background just has too many issues and we I am using links to the images because there are so many. It is very desirable, especially with bird and wildlife images, to beДЄble to apply noise reduction and other filters to the background only and apply sharpening only to I'm sure you can find lots of other applications for this plug-in besides This capture is a perfect example of an image that can be 'saved' by using an extraction Thanks to Nancy Bell for letting me use her wonderful shot of the Green-headed Tanager as anД®xample.

#Topaz remask tutorial for vail Pc#

This software is available for both PC and Mac and works with Photoshop CS3-CS5 and Elements 6-9. Usual disclaimers apply - I don't work for them or receive any other form Now that Topaz ReMask 3 has been released, I am posting this brief tutorial of this very useful