Image Masking | A Game-Changer in the World of Digital Art

by Delwar Hussain / Last Update: September 16, 2023

Image Masking in Product Photography:

The e-commerce market is going to hit $7.4 trillion by 2025 as projected by market researchers of Statista, a data analyst company. According to Forbes, during the corona pandemic e-commerce sales grew 50% more than previous. The forecast report says, over the next three years, it will grow around 50% of its present market from now. Global market analysts didn’t indicate any negative signs, that can be the cause of slowing down e-commerce business in the future. If you are a smart business owner, you definitely want to be a part of this huge market share.

Figure 01. Previous and projected sales for ecommerce 2014 – 2025

[Source: Statista, a data analyst company, https://bit.ly/3OXvrr3]

For taking a portion of this growth, you are required to organize your e-commerce business to be more professional, engaging, and responsive. What do you think? What are the first impactful strategies that make your e-commerce business more professional? The answer is the visual representation of your website. The other side of the coin says, product images are the first elements that represent your website. As a result, an e-commerce store needs to come out with professional product images. Image Masking is only an impactful photo editing service. Which removes the background of product images to make it more focused, engaging, and responsive. That’s why Image Masking is important in e-commerce business.

What is Image Masking?

Image masking is a process of separating one portion or subject from the rest of the part of images. It can remove the background from pictures of subjects with fuzzy edges, such as hair, wool, or fur.

Clipping path is another service that can remove the portion of the subject from the image to make it transparent or background less. Sometimes a clipping path does not give you the best solution to retrieve the product, basically on a fur product or model with curly hair, through image masking it can be easily doable. Though sometimes clipping path and image masking are applied at the same time to get better results. A clipping path can potentially be used to remove the backdrop from complex photographs, but the outcome is less pleasing than it would have been using image masking.

How many types of Image Masking exist?

There are several types of Image Masking in the market of image editing services. Like, Layer Masking, Alpha Channel Masking, Transparent Masking, Fur & Hair Masking, Refine Edge Masking, Translucent Object Masking, etc.

Layer Masking:

Layer masking initiates the Image Masking Service. It’s applied on the layer of image by the help of pen tools to separate the subject from the image background. It is used commonly on image masking services to remove portions with soft edges, hair, fur, and more complex subjects. Also the selected subject could be separated from the image body by changing the opacity of the selected area. When we use the mask, only the chosen area is visible.

The areas that haven’t been chosen will be hidden. Photoshop Layer masking is used to create a clean edge around the cut-out image when a vector path alone is unable to eliminate the background of complicated images with a fine edge. Layer masking doesn’t cut down the image pixel. The output of masking always has a nice and clean image subject that is separated from the background image.

Alpha Channel Masking:

Pixel-based masking known as Alpha Channel Masking or more precisely, the shape of images rather than a color. Layer masking performs better in terms of its file size. The image is saved in the alpha channel after separating the subject from the background of images so that it could be adjustable with brightness, contrast, exposure, etc. File sizes are reduced via the Alpha Channel Masking service, making them appropriate for uploading or downloading.

 

The channels may occasionally be used to remove the background and pick out certain items from the image body. Selecting objects with a solid color or simple background is done using this technique.

Transparent Masking:

The  transparent image subjects like glass, pure water, water bottle, lenses, etc. those images are difficult to separate subject from image background by using pen tool. To eliminate the background from these photographs with gradient transparencies, we, Cutting Edger employ transparent masking.

 

For photographs of glass, lightning, glass jewelry, etc. as well as a large number of product images used for advertising purposes in catalogs and e-commerce stores, transparent masking in Photoshop is utilized. Additionally, they range from 0 to 5 percent opaque, making it difficult to make them transparent. This process preserves the authenticity of the color and is non-destructive.

Fur & Hair Masking:

Model photoshoot required fur and hair masking service. The hair is more complex to take down by using pen tools. Fur and hair are soft and smooth edges, we use masking to separate them from the image’s background. We fix exposure of the image’s color, contrast, and brightness in addition to sharpening it to give it a more natural look.

 

 

5 Benefits of Image Masking in Your Product Photography:

1. Clear Visual Communication:

An image represents thousands of words visually. A good quality image has enough communication power to convince its audience visually. Images have the potentiality to communicate important information in the most enticing and attractive manner. Customers’ purchase selections may be influenced by the colors utilized. Image Masking service makes e-commerce images more clear with visual messages to communicate with potential customers.

2. Increase Revenues:

When potential customers visit an online store, the crystal-clear, bright, and focused photos that will convince them to purchase the products. A compelling image may drive massive traffic to your ecommerce site and convert visitors into paying customers. It is always preferable to spend a significant sum for image editing and masking than to dispose of the items carelessly. Increasing your company’s revenue is one of the main goals of outsourcing image editing or masking procedures.

3. Create Brand  Image:

Identity of a brand is an essential element to establish a strong Brand Image to people. Quality image is a meaningful strategy to represent an ecommerce store that appeals to a classic brand image to the public mind. Brand Identity has an overall effect on your business development. That’s why establishing a good brand image in the public mind makes a strong business. Brand Identity and Brand Image both sound like the same things. But those two are technically different things. Brand Identity is how a business represents itself to people and Brand Image is how people think about the brand from their ends. Cutting Edger helps you to build your brand Identity to grab your potential customers.

4. Non-destructive Image:

The procedure of image masking is completely non-destructive. Restoring something that has been deleted from the background of a photograph might be difficult. However, you may easily hide any section and then quickly bring it back when you want to use picture masking. Additionally, working with the background won’t have any impact on your main subject.

5. Increase Image Quality:

Image masking increases the quality of product images. When a product image is utilized on an e-commerce platform, it must go through a number of alterations. Addition and removal of items, changing the undesired backdrop, exposure adjustments, and color corrections are some of the common image editing and masking services.

Final Words:

Image Masking is an impactful service for separating image subject from image background. Though clipping path is also an effective tool to separate image elements from backgrounds, complex image subjects can’t be separated by clipping path. Image Masking tools separate image elements into layer to layer impactfully and come out with non-destructive image quality. If you don’t find any service provider who can do image masking for your business with quality, fast turnover time, and cost-effective way. You can count Cutting Edger to start the image masking service for making a difference on your image quality.