designers - what do you use to create your masks?
 

Looking for something to create masks of difficult to mask things, eg hair, trees etc

I've had a play with the demo of Mask Pro 4 and it seems pretty damn powerful....

anything better out there before I take the plunge?

wot, nobody uses a PS plugin to mask???

Nope. If you're talking about cropping images I use a path and the good, old pen tool. I can crop the most "difficult" images in 5 minutes that way. And, really, there isn't such a thing as a difficult image to "mask" -- although I HATE sets shot on a white or black background. It creates highlights and low lights on the model that require further correction. A natural setting produces the best images for cropping, IMHO :2 cents:

I found this tutorial online which looks like it does what your asking, but it is manual no plugin required just Photoshop: http://www.phong.com/tutorials/mask.tree/

i know you already know this... but...
cropping and masking are to completely different things...
and why are you putting mask in quotes?... that's what it's called...
thus layer mask... vector mask.. quick mask...

and for the original question...
mask pro... fluid mask... ez mask... power mask.... etc..
mask pro being my personal favorite.

Fluid Mask is incredible - fine wispy hair against a complicated background with transparency in the hair, no plugin is going to do that without a lot of tinkering. some photos just weren't meant to be masked, move on and pick another one.

Thanks guys helpful pointers. I'm no PS guru and so everything takes me ages in there, which is why I use plugins from imagenomic and nik software - what they do can alll be done in PS on its own, but just takes me ages (and looks crappier), so I don't mind shelling out for plugins if they speed up my workflow.

Going to give the demo of fluid mask a try to compare with mask pro :thumbsup