Masking made modern

Facet Team
Apr 23, 2021
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2 minute read

One thing that really drives me crazy is making masks! It could take hours to separate a subject from the background on each image, you actually could end working half day just doing selections. - Walter C.,  photographer, Facet Pro.

If someone gave you a can of soup, would you try to open it with a knife? No. Because that would be difficult (and dangerous), and because there’s this thing called a can opener that makes the task easy. In other words, the right tool for the job.

Whether you’re using a pencil, a brush, or iPhone photo filters, tools shape your art. Unfortunately, a lot of photo editing software relies on old-school dark room analogs, which reduce the image to pixels. You spend most of your time tracing these pixels instead of playing with a holistic image. Why let your clunky photo editing tools hinder your creative process?

Add better tools to your belt

At Facet, we’re eliminating the cumbersome tools that stand in the way of your creativity. How? We use AI to streamline the creative process and eliminate tedious, time consuming tracing and mask generation. We do this by automatically generating relevant masks - based on the subjects of your photos.

Edit the way you see

Facet is designed to let you work the way you think. Instead of tracing shapes and figures yourself, delineating foreground from background, person from place, pixel from pixel, Facet is content aware. It can look at a photo and identify what’s a person and what’s an animal. It can even separate out skin from hair, and accessories from outfits. How do we do this? Unlike existing photo editing tools, Facet uses AI and machine learning to train computers to recognize the contents of each photo. Like you, Facet sees objects, not pixels.

This sounds great, but what does it mean for your process? Let’s say you have a photo of a woman with red hair or wearing orange. When you upload your photo to Facet, our platform reads the image and sees what objects are in it. Then, it creates masks for each object. You’ll have a mask for the girl, her face, her clothes, and the background wall. You can select individual layers or groups of layers, for example 'all foreground layers.' You can then edit the premade masks, quickly lightening the background or recoloring the model’s hair. You can also tell Facet to “match the colors to another image, but don't make her skin tone purple.”

When you are working on one photo, the time savings are delightful; when you are working across an entire photoshoot, they are remarkable. Export your content aware layers to Photoshop having saved hours by avoiding the lasso tool. Or use auto-masking in Facet to easily apply filters and effects across all your photos since photos from the same shoot will have similar  auto-generated masks, giving you more time to keep your creativity - and your images - fresh. Welcome to the right tool for the job.


From designers, to artists, to those working in social media - our users keep telling us how much time Facet saves them, and we couldn’t ask for a better compliment. If you haven’t tried Facet yet, good news: it's free to try!

We’re excited to see what you’ll create.