Years ago, I worked on an antiques magazine, and I would always dread the annual collectable teddy bear feature. It always took me many hours to cut out the fluffy little fellas from their backgrounds, which ranged from tablecloths to someone's front lawn and, after all my efforts, they still looked like I'd cut them out with a rusty knife! Back then, I would have killed for a tool such as the brilliant Fluid Mask.
Fluid Mask from Vertustech is an incredibly powerful Photoshop plug-in for creating cut-outs from pretty much any background. It works on the principle of three masks - Keep, Delete and Complex - which I'll cover in more detail on the following pages.
The real beauty of Fluid Mask is the wide range of methods it uses to apply the masks, depending on different types of image. I'll get you started by focusing on using brushes to apply masks, but once you get under the skin of Fluid Mask you'll uncover a range of other methods for creating masks.
Here I'll show you how to create masks with the Exact, Local and Global brushes, then reveal the best way to edit your masks and create a full Photoshop cut-out. You'll never have to draw another clipping path again!
