Why A.I. Masks Might be Degrading Your Photography

Post-processing software has certainly come a long way since the early days of Photoshop when we used techniques such as ‘chops’ to mask off areas of a photograph. If you’ve never heard the term before, then allow me to dredge up a bit of ancient pre-history from the frontier years of digital photography.

Popularised by a bloke called Kai Krause (who had an excellent plugin called Kai’s Power Tools), ‘chops’ (short for Channel Operations) were a way to exploit an image’s individual colour channels (Red, Green, Blue) to isolate detail and create high-fidelity selections, masks, and blends.

Selections made with a ‘chop’ offered higher precision than a selection made using the only other options – the lasso and magic wand tools. This is because colour channels contain tonal separations that are superior to those edge-finding tools, especially for hair, foliage, clouds and texture.