New Program

[Dan]

This is not a request for a new features in Neat Image, but a suggestion for a completely different program or PShop plugin.

Difficult instances of "Selecting objects" in PShop have led to a number of 3rd party products (Magic Mask, Extensis Mask Pro, Auto Mask, Corel Knockout etc.), including PShops' own Extract tool.

One of the most difficult "Masking" or "Object Selection" examples that I know of, is a face with thin wispy flyaway hair. Most of these "Masking tools or programs" claim to do a good job in this case, but in fact most do very poor jobs, and some like Knockout which works fairly well, does so only under ideal conditions (object is against a uniform background of a color which is very different from the hair). If conditions are not ideal, then making the tool work takes painstaking, time consuming, detailed outlining and labelling of intermediate regions (between inner and outer outline). Knockout may be the best, but it is very expensive, fairly buggy, and hard to learn to use under non ideal conditions.

So why am I bringing this up at all?

Here is my reasoning. You guys at NeatImage are very, very smart, and if you could bring to the masking problem a solution even half as good as what you have done for removing noise from digital images, you would produce the best "Masking" tool program.

For example, none of the expensive "Masking" programs, combine, multiple selection strategies in order to select intelligently. With hair, for example -contiguity (connectedness?) is always (or almost always) a useful selection characteristic, as is a certain amount of color/hue/saturation variability (thins wisps of hair are lighter than a mass of hair bunched together). Possibly the spatial frequency may be another useful characteristic under some conditions. Of course, reducing noise in digital images will produce clearer boundaries between objects in the images which should make the selection process of masking less difficult.

So, I'm just saying that once you have tweaked NeatImage to near perfection and if you're looking for a new project, perhaps this would be a challenging project. The question of course is whether there are enough people interested in a better tool of this sort.


Thanks for letting me babble,

Dan

[NITeam]

Dan,

Thank you for bringing this up and suggesting a poll. Yes, we still have a lot of work with NI itself (plugin version, Mac version, etc.), but after that we may do something about the suggested subject. That depends on the many factors including the opinions of people who vote. So, we are not promising anything at this moment but lets see the poll results to keep them for the future reference.

Vlad