Glossary   Terms To Know

A Clipping Path is the path along which an image is cut out. Imagine cutting your image with a pair of scissors or a cookie-cutter. The Clipping Path is the outline made by the scissors or cutter.

When you remove the background with a clipping path, there is fundamentally a vector shape (the path) that cuts the image out with a uniform amount of feathering (soft transparency at the edges).

This gives a crisp edge to the result and creates clean cutouts.

Clipping Magic uses a Clipping Path to separate the non-hair-sections from the background.

A Clipping Mask is pixel as opposed to vector based. Masks are primarily used when there are areas of partial transparency that would get lost if cut using a Clipping Path.

Clipping Magic uses a Clipping Mask for the hair section when separating it from the background.

If you don't want to get deep down and dirty with Photoshop, you can outsource your image editing to a Clipping Path Service.

Clipping Magic is an alternative to using a Clipping Path Service - it's an online Clipping Path Self-Service Tool if you will. Clipping Magic lets you instantly cut out your foregrounds without needing to learn advanced Graphic Design skills.

In some industries, the cut out foregrounds are referred to as "Silos" or "Silhouettes".

Isolating an object is to cut it out from its surroundings, i.e. removing the background.

To knock out a background is to remove it.

The background frequently bleeds into the foreground around the edges, especially for parts of a photo that are out of focus.

This can lead to Halos in the result, where even though the foreground has been cut out, you can still see a bit of an outline of the background around your subject.

Hand-drawn Clipping Paths typically deal with this by using an Offset. Clipping Magic on the other hand actively analyzes every pixel along the edge and re-estimates what color it should be, thereby eliminating the need for Offsets in most cases and allowing a more complete recovery of the foreground.

Advanced Halo reduction is always used, regardless of any Refine settings.

Clipping Paths are typically drawn slightly inset to avoid Halos.

While Clipping Magic actively re-estimates the edge colors and therefore usually doesn't require using an Offset, you can still do so under the Refine menu.

When cutting out an image, the cutting boundary is usually feathered, giving it a few pixels over which it transitions from fully opaque to fully transparent.

This makes for a soft cutout that looks more natural.

Most images are fully opaque. However, when cutting out the background, part of the image needs to be made transparent. This transparency is usually encoded using a so called Alpha Channel.

This allows for nicely feathered images with soft transitions from fully opaque to fully transparent.

JPEG doesn't support transparency, PNG has full transparency support, and GIF only supports binary transparency (a pixel is either fully opaque or fully transparent).

To cut out a image is to remove the background from it.