A plugin to isolate fine areas of an image

[NewToPremiereElements]

I started with CS6 years ago and am now using Photoshop 2021 because I eventually gave up the fight against upgrading my PC from Windows 7 !!

My CS6 setup had a plugin filter which was superb at isolating edges such as whisps of hair blowing in a breeze.  Where I had a picture which included trees in leaf with the sky showing through the leaves it enabled me to isolate the leaves so that, in CS6, I could mask them out in order to make adjustments to the sky - for instance, those areas of the sky between the leaves were often blown out to white, and I could add a tone of blue without affecting the leaves.

When I moved to Windows 10 I lost CS6 and, of course,  that filter plugin.

If anyone has any ideas of what that plugin was I'd be grateful to know so that I can find out if it is still availble and, if so, whether I could use it with 2021.

Many thanks.

[NewToPremiereElements]

Have just found out that it was Vertus Fluid Mask.  Downloads are offered by all sorts of websites.  From various comments I've read there could be a lot of scam activity going on here, so best to avoid it.

In the light of this, what's your view on the best toll/technique for achieving my example of the sky among the leaves???

Frank

[davescm]

For the sky example, look through the channels to find the channel with the most contrast between leaf and sky, duplicate it, add more contrast and use it as a mask

Dave

[NewToPremiereElements]

Many thanks for your response. I've had a quick go at it and found that, while not as good as the plug in, it's hugely better than all my other attempts with the Photoshop tools. I need to practice some more to improve my use of your solution.

Again, many thanks.
Best regards

[davescm]

Whilst most masking tools/methods are sold as a single press solution, and are demonstrated with ideal subject material, many real world cases require two or three methods to be combined to arrive at a good final mask. Channel masking, which I described above is just one of those.

You can sharpen up the resulting mask in selected areas by setting a soft brush to overlay blend mode (note that is the brush not the layer) and painting with black on the black side of the edge and white on the white side of the edge.

Dave

[D Fosse]

I just have to ask - you have tried Select and Mask in Photoshop? It's a whole other paradigm than anything that was available in CS6, and it does exactly what you're describing.

If you're looking for more automated AI-based masking, ACR might be worth a shot. AI is not my cup of tea, so I haven't really used it, but it has supposedly become very good at what it does.

EDIT - as for channel based masking as Dave talks about, there is an oldie but goodie: Image > Calculations. It lets you extract maximum contrast from two channels combined, using blend modes and/or invert.

[NewToPremiereElements]

Thank you for that.  I have to say that I'm struggling with 2021 - it has some many features and facilities that I'd never heard of or come across.  Trouble is I (at 79 !!) am so rooted in what I now (i.e., CS6) that I simply want to get on and do what I used to be able to do straight away (if that makes sense!).  I'm going to have to learn to be patient - use  the Adobe community and Google "in Photoshop how do I .....?" to build up my knowledge of what's possible. Thanks again to you and to Davescm.