What's the best image feature masking /selecting solution currently ?

gnoop

I prefer to make textures from photographs when possible  .     They just takes less time for comparable quality   than  never-ending  Substance Designer tweaking.     Still  for nice roughness variation based not just on height /normal map details   It's critical to have some easy and semi-automatic  feature  selecting/masking tool .   Like selecting old brown leaves or twigs  on also brown dirt  etc.

Is there anything new and shiny  on that front currently ? AI based or anything?      I extended  my Photoshop subscription last year  only because their promised   AI selecting  tool and it turned to be  absolutely useless for the purpose.     Any other soft that can do it?

I recall I had some masking plugin for Photoshop decade ago  which splits an image to a gazilion of small areas  and you could  pick those areas.   Also pretty tedious  but maybe something  same with AI  now?   Couldn't even recollect the plugin name

Eric Chadwick

The Quick Selection Tool/brush is pretty nice, I've found it's fairly "smart" about refining the edges as you progressively paint the add/remove areas, it learns from what you've painted, helping you by refining similar areas. Not perfect, but better than pure manual painting.

Also the Select And Mask tools are really helpful.
https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/select-mask.html

But none of the automated ways are going to help much when you have little differentiation between subject and background. 

gnoop

Thanks  Eric.    I do try to use that Select an Mask but unfortunately it's not that great with separating typical features found in textures. It does work fine with something like selecting people in images but not  thing like twigs , small pebbles  ets.  

Wonder if anyone tried Topaz mask AI?

Eric Chadwick

Well you just gotta feed it the right kind of photo. There needs to be some kind of contrast there, otherwise none of these auto tools will work.

A recent example, made this asset for the glTF shader development work we're doing with Khronos.
https://github.com/KhronosGroup/glTF-Sample-Models/blob/f56d1fb15a50cfc3b3ce80f86158152eec3df6cb/2.0/StainedGlassLamp/README.md

The stained glass is extracted from photos, like this. Because I need to replicate a real-world object.


I used the Quick Selection Tool to mask off the black leading between the glass bits, so I could make various maps... bump, roughness, translucency, etc. It wasn't easy, only got me half the way there, since some parts of the glass are really dark, and some parts of the leading are really bright. So, a mix and match of various selection tools.