Is Fluid Mask 3 the best Knockout Plug-ins if not which one is?

Question

Is Fluid Mask 3 the best Knockout Plug-ins for Photoshop, if not which one is? I will appreciate it if someone can recommend a good and sophisticated Photoshop Knockout Plug-ins. Thank you

Answer 1

Kim,
In answer to your original question, Fluid Mask 3
is probably the most fully featured of the current masking tools, and apparently the most expensive. Thanks to your message, I took a closer look at Fluid Mask 3 and, as a result, I have added it to my "wish list" for when I get enough free budget for the purchase. But thanks for keeping me from "blowing my money" on a lesser tool.
I had originally decided against Fluid Mask based on the fact that much of its masking is based on the concept of "inside colors" and "outside colors" and, indeed, Fluid Mask has some very powerful tools for implementing that concept. But in
many cases that concept breaks down because many colors appear both inside and outside a "foreground" object.
Some insects and other creatures in nature rely on protective coloration (camouflage) and, for example, such a bug sitting on tree bark will have most of the tree bark repeated in its color pattern.
But even human subject subjects can have surrounding colors repeated on them, either by happenstance or by the phenomenon of radiosity, in which each illuminated object becomes a secondary light source.
In the real world, the circumstance in which the foreground object has a unique set of colors different from the background is very rare. That is why I used Corel KnockOut 1.5 so much. In it, you draw an inside line and an outside line and they define very local sets of inside and outside colors which can be interpolated for a transition mask. Those color sets can change continuously along the boundary, allowing for repeated color reversals. The motto of the original Ultimatte KnockOut (before Corel purchased it) was, "There are no edges, there are only transitions." KnockOut produced some very good knockouts for me for that reason. However, the tedium of drawing inside lines and outside lines, and refining them, slowed the process of getting a good mask.
Fluid Mask's automatically produced adjustable vector sub-boundaries are a very interesting, unique, and useful feature that can help deal with objects that have areas of color that match the color of background areas, by letting you choose which areas are inside and which areas are outside. Those automatically drawn vector patches are what changed my mind about Fluid Mask. I think I could get a good mask faster with Fluid Mask 3 than I could with KnockOut 1.5, and that is the reason why I think Fluid Mask 3 might be worth its rather high price.
But, like I said before, it will be awhile before I have the budget to make that purchase. There are several software tools that have higher priority, like an upgrade to Photoshop CS3 Extended, for example.
-- Burton --