Mask Pro 3 review

Extensis has upgraded its Mask Pro plug-in for Photoshop and Photoshop Elements to run natively under Mac OS X.

As well as introducing a couple of new tools, Mask Pro 3 provides more ways of previewing your masks before committing yourself, and speeds up the generation of clipping paths.

Mask Pro 3 opens the currently selected layer in your artwork into its own window and you use a pair of highlighter pen-style tools to mark up the image areas you want to keep and those you want to mask out (or 'drop'). Based on the colour information in these Keep and Drop areas, Mask Pro 3 determines how to deal with the edge between them. If you prefer to trace out the intended mask edge directly, the plug-in provides a standard Pen tool and an edge-snapping Magic Pen. When you return to Photoshop, you can set the masked areas to be deleted from the layer, or simply masked out, or converted to a Photoshop path.

The Keep and Drop palettes make Mask Pro 3 powerful. By adding colours to these palettes, either using associated eyedropper tools or selecting from Photoshop's standard colour chooser, you teach the plug-in more about the areas you want to mask. You then have the option of painting over the image with the Magic Brush; as you paint, the Drop colours are erased and the Keep colours preserved. This works especially well when you want to mask transparent areas, if not so well with translucent ones. With a lot of patience and customisation of the brushes you can do it, but it seems a gentle, easily controllable reduction in pixel opacity isn't part of Mask Pro 3's remit.

Halo again

For all other masking work, the plug-in achieves the right result very quickly. Also useful is the series of preview background options made available as buttons across the bottom of the working window. With these, you can temporarily bring back 'dropped' areas and view the mask on black or on white with one click. Especially valuable is an option that uses the next Photoshop layer below the one you're working on as the preview background.

Another star feature is the Chisel tool, which is designed to deal with halos. Often the first attempt by Mask Pro 3, as with any masking filter, needs some tidying up along the edge. Instead of forcing you to paint Keep and Drop areas back in on either side of the edge (although you can do that if you want), you can drag along the edge itself with the Chisel and marvel as it strips away any ragged bits and unsightly halos.

Our only big complaint with Mask Pro 3 is its occasionally unintuitive interface. For example, you don't generate a mask preview by clicking a button as you'd expect: instead, you have to switch to the Magic Brush tool and locate the unhelpfully titled Apply Tool To All command in the program menus. When using the Brush tool, none of the usual Photoshop keyboard modifiers will toggle it between Add and Subtract mode. Time and time again we had to return to the manual before we could carry out even very basic tasks.

Once you learn the mysteries, Mask Pro 3 is definitely worth the effort. It's streets ahead of the standard Extract filter, and is a highly effective alternative to Corel's KnockOut 2 at half the price.