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Since reviewing Knockout 1.5 about a year ago, I
have been eagerly anticipating version 2. A knock on the door,
and it has arrived at my front door. I opened the stylish box
and slipped the CD into my CD_ROM on my new 733 G4 and this is
what happened…
Knockout is the leading masking program that
Corel Corp. acquired from a cinema bluescreen company,
Ultimatte. KO enables you to remove an object from the
background in a similar fashion to the extract tool in
Photoshop. However Knockout is a much more powerful tool and
enables you to remove “impossible” objects like glass, liquids,
hair and smoke.
Documentation is superb, with a full color
manual and an updated quicktime tutorial on the enclosed CD. In
about 15 minutes I was ready to try out the software.
Installation was a snap on OSX as the product is
fully carbonized for OSX. To date, Corel Corp. have more
products for OSX than any other company. (It also works on 8.6
and up and Windows 98, 2000 and XP.) Knockout 2 is the 3rd
Program to be released from Procreate. Procreate is a new branch
from Corel which handles the professional graphics side of
things. The previous 2 releases are Painter 7 and KPT effects.
The first improvement to strike me immediately
is that Knockout is now a plug-in instead of a stand alone
product. This saves a lot of time and hassle with alpha
channels. Another great improvement is the memory hungry beast
has been put on a diet. The folks at Procreate have reduced its
memory demands, and anyone who has used 1.5 on the Mac can now
allocate that RAM somewhere else. It also now supports CMYK
images.
Using Knockout 2 is more streamlined than before
with the addition of Photoshop Shortcuts, no more having to
learn a whole new arsenal of keyboard tricks. It did a splendid
job of quickly lifting this image.
KO is fairly easy to use and had 4 different levels of masking.
I was surprised to find that version 2 doesn't just have a lot
of usability enhancements but also does an even better job than
1.5 of detecting the edges of an image. If you don't get the
image quite right there are tools that enable you to fine tune
the selections.
There is also the welcome addition of the "touchup tools" yes,
we now have a paintbrush and eraser tool for quick fixes, this
is one of my favorites. You can view your work as an alpha
channel or choose different colors to display against your
masked image, you can even choose another image as the
background. If you totally mess it up you can revert the file
and there are now 99 levels of undo.
If you look at the close up here, you can
see how clean the masking is around the hair. I was very
impressed with the results. With a little practice and time you
could remove almost anything.
My conclusion is that Knockout 2 is well built
and the new features certainly make it worth the upgrade. It is
a strong program that does what it is designed to do very well.
If you are a professional designer who regularly extracts images
from their backgrounds it is a must buy. The only draw-back is a
pretty steep recommended price of $329 and the upgrade for
US$149.
In my review of Knockout 1.5 I said "with a
stronger undo feature, 1.5 would receive a solid 5 out of 5."
Version 2 definatly deserves that rating. |