Image Cutout Tool for Photoshop A “Snap”
I just found out about Snap, a Photoshop plugin from Digital Film Tools. It’s supposed to make isolating an object a “snap”. Your other options being the Magic Wand tool and the Extract filter. Snap is supposed to enable selecting foreground or background information by just telling it areas to consider for each. No need to mess with tolerance levels or carefully tracing the outline. Sounds great!
Always one to cripple my computer with try out a new plugin, I took the 15 minutes to try it out. How did it work? The quick answer: Not impressed, but better than the other options. The long answer: Keep reading.
Installation: The install was pretty painless. I had to show it where the Photoshop plugin directory was; something that most other installs would find automatically. It took me a moment to figure out the option was added to the Select menu, instead of the Filter menu as I was expecting. That makes sense, but I didn’t think of looking there at first.
Interface: A two-year old could figure out how draw the green line to signify the foreground. However, for the life of me I couldn’t figure out how to draw the red line to signify the background. Of course, smarter users would have read the little help at the bottom of the screen which stated to use the right mouse button for background lines. But I sat there trying every combination of keys and mouse clicks EXCEPT the right mouse button. Who’s going to take responsibility for this?
It was easy to figure out how to change the settings to increase the accuracy. Using the Override Edge and Edit Points options were a piece of pound cake.
Overall, not that bad. There aren’t a lot of options to really confuse you (or me). Additionally, the options that are there make relatively good sense.
Results: Maybe my expectations were a little high, but I wasn’t as full of Snap-love as expected. The results were not fool-proof. I’m probably being a little harsh, but if I’m going to spend $50 for a plugin, it better do a lot more than the standard Photoshop tools. It DID do a better and faster job, but not enough to warrant the price.
Final Conclusion: If I was doing a lot of cutout work, I’d probably buy it. Hey, it’s the best so far. But right now, I’m saving my $50 for something else.
Responses and Conversations
I’m definitely a firm believer in doing knock-out work by hand, and I almost never use the magic wand. The best tool is the polygon selection tool – it allows me to get better edges. Curves are really easy – just add more nodes to the path.
But the key to any knockout work is after you’ve copied out the object (that’s right – you copy the object out of the image rather than cutting out the background) you then hit it with the smudge or eraser tool and give your hard edges a softer look.
Any other tips?
Comment by Christopher Frazier on February 13th, 2006 at 7:41 am
I’m a copier as well. I always leave the original alone.
I’ve never tried using curves. I’ll give it a go.
You can feather the edges as well to get the softer look.
Comment by John Koontz on February 13th, 2006 at 10:09 am