photoshop?

In recent months my most active way of participating in fandom has been iconmaking. It's very fun and doing challenges pushes me to think in creative ways different from my usual and that feels wonderful. My only "issue" is that I don't have Photoshop anymore. (Well, I've got Photoshop at work but I'm not supposed to use that for personal business.)

So thanks to all of this I've been using a variety of software. Glimpse has been nice and I like how similar it is to GIMP, which I used for several years before switching to Photoshop.

I tried Krita again too. I originally tried it—maybe—five years ago? I mostly liked it but for whatever reason stopped using it. Well, turns out Krita has cool brushes and, much more importantly, can apply corrective filters as masks almost like I'm used to from Photoshop. And there are a lot more blending options for layers.

So speaking of Photoshop, I'll finally get to the point of this post. At some point they added a feature that automatically removes backgrounds from images. Like think of a portrait photo, click and BAM the background is gone. I kept seeing videos of that but never really believed any of them.

Well, I finally tried that today at work because I had some free time and was shocked that it worked. I took a screenshot from a video, depicting a woman holding a bag, and told it to work its magic. It did it, not perfectly, but it gave me a mask so I could fix what I need: a shadowy area on her leg had been wrongly masked out too but that's very easily fixable.

I guess, gone are the days of painstakingly erasing backgrounds for hours by hand...provided I'm up for spending money on Adobe once again, of course. (I would, truth be told, if I had more time to actually use all the stuff.)