If you work with photos, CUTOUT 5 Pro is probably worth a look, mainly because Franzis software is usually worth a look, if only a quick one. If nothing else it takes up just 18 MB, giving you another option if you’re having problems getting the results you want using your favorite app(s). When it comes to photo editing object selection tools, I’ve become jaded… they’ve been coming up with new & improved tools for decades, and while the latest products are easier than ever, they have yet to provide any real improvement in the quality of results. The best results you can get using CUTOUT aren’t going to be much different than the best results you can get using comparable tools – the difference is in how you get there, in how much work you have to do. [There’s one possible exception I’ll try to explain below.]
CUTOUT 5 makes the initial selection easy – you draw a loose outline outside the area you want to select, then draw a similar outline inside that area -- and the first results may be good enough for your purposes – if not, it provides more tools to refine the selection. CUTOUT 8 makes it easier yet & is definitely worth a look if you like how today’s version 5 works. In my opinion PSP 2020 is easier, while P/Shop’s latest version using AI takes the crown, but that’s me.
Today’s CUTOUT 5 Pro is a bit of a PITA since it only starts full-screen, and annoyingly, with the win10 taskbar set to Autohide, the task bar won’t pop up when you move the curser to the bottom of the screen. Had to Alt + Tab to view the email with registration data to activate it. The plug-ins for CUTOUT 5 Pro & Std. are in folders in the program’s folder – you must copy/paste them manually [sometimes copy/pasting shortcuts works better with Franzis apps] – which is actually a plus when it comes to Franzis. Some Franzis software tries to copy them into place during setup, usually getting it wrong [particularly with the older versions given away], so you have to play games finding the plug-ins and getting them where you want them. With giveaways like today’s CUTOUT 5 Pro, Franzis puts the real setup app in a wrapper that’s expanded into the User temp folder once you copy/paste the key in the dialog. I normally try to save that setup file for future use, and I also open it using Universal Extractor to get the plug-ins, making sure I have them. The real setup file for CUTOUT 5 Pro however is locked – it will not run to install the app. That said, once you install CUTOUT 5 Pro or Std., you can copy the program’s folder to another copy of Windows, where it’ll run and activate just fine [I have 2 copies of win10 on this PC, & I do that rather than run setup twice]. There is a 32 & 64-bit version.
It’s important to note that using CUTOUT, or any other selection apps &/or tools, the image itself can play a Big part in how well things turn out. A photo has continuous tone, without sharp, well defined edges like you see in graphics [e.g. charts etc.], but the amount of noise in a photo, the amount of clarity, how sharp the picture is, all effect how well edges are defined [or not]. An object edge or border may span across 2 or 3 pixels, or it may take a half dozen, or dozen, or with a particularly noisy photo, you may be hard pressed to even see an edge when you’ve zoomed in using a photo editor. If you’re selecting an area to apply whatever FX, that doesn’t matter a whole lot, and if you’re trying to remove an object, it may not matter a lot, but when you’re trying to cut out and save an object, the sharpness of the edge or border can be critical. While one app or tool might not be all that much better at finding an edge than another, competing app or tool, using CUTOUT you *may* be able to improve the existing edge, e.g. in a noisy photo, & with the selection based on that, it may give better results. You *might* also achieve the same thing reducing noise &/or sharpening the image before trying to make a selection using other tools, but this sort of thing really varies depending on the technical quality of the image itself.