CutOut is an app to make selections in an image or photo – some versions include Photoshop compatible plug-ins, though if you have an image editing app that can use them, you can already use that editing app’s built-in image selection tools. Whether those built-in tools will work as well or better than CutOut depends on both the image and the editing app.
What are selections?... If or as you get into image editing there will be times you only want something to apply to a portion of the image, and an easy way to make that happen is to select just the part(s) you want to be affected. Other times you might want to remove something from an image, or add something [copy/paste], or move something etc… all of those require selecting the part(s) of the image you want to do something to or with. The big catch is that making, creating a selection isn’t always easy.
While the amount of fuzziness will vary depending on the camera & lens used to take the original photo, if you zoom in far enough, you’ll never see a sharp edge in a photo. You’ll see something similar in scanned photos, where along with the limitations of pixels you’ve got the original film grain. If you have something super simple like a blue ball on a white background, zoom in and you’ll see solid blue and solid white pixels, with a mix of blue & white pixels in between at the object’s edge. If you wanted to copy that ball & paste it on a black background, most methods of selecting the ball will include some of those white pixels, so it’ll have a white fringe showing against that black backdrop. The general cure for that sort of thing is to shrink the selection by a few pixels, then add feathering to the edge of the selection to mimic the way the blue pixels sort of faded to white. [Without the feathering you might get pixilated edges that look like stair steps.] But that won’t work with things like hair, when/if strands are so thin that shrinking the selection will eliminate them completely.
That’s where specialized apps like CutOut come in. There are all sorts of methods and tools and tutorials you can use, again depending in part of the image & the software you’re using, so CutOut is more of an option than a necessity, but you might find that you like using it more than some of those other tools and methods. Of course, none of the tools or methods are perfect, while for some purposes, like including an image on a web page, the results don’t have to be perfect either.
The Franzis apps that are given away, & many [most?] of those you’d pay for, normally install to a single folder in C:\Program Files\Franzis\. You can normally copy that folder wherever, including to a different PC or copy of Windows. If the app requires activation – with some you enter the key to unlock the program’s setup routine – enter the key when you 1st start it, and when you 1st start it all the needed files/folders that would be copied as part of the installation will normally be added to C:\Users\ [UserName]\.
The plug-ins, if/when included, can be trickier. Sometimes they’re in the zipped file you download – sometimes they’re in a folder after you run setup – sometimes they’re only available when the installer detects a compatible app & copies them to what it *thinks* is the correct folder. I’ve had problems with that last one, with the setup routine missing compatible image editors &/or copying the plug-ins to the wrong folder – I’ve often had to extract the plug-in files from the setup file using 7-zip or Universal Extractor. Often the only way the plug-in will work is if I copy it to the program’s folder, and put a shortcut to that plug-in in the appropriate folder used by the image editing app.
Franzis occasionally has some great offers in their emails [e.g. $20 for the current Pro version of different apps], and some of their software is resold under the Ashampoo banner, and Ashampoo sometimes has some very good deals. If you like CutOut, you can see the advantages of the different versions at this site:
projects-software[.]com/cutout-comparison-tabl