Decompose - 1.0.2

Never having used ANYthing like this before, I was quite impressed by it's capabilities and results. HINT: Read their Tutorial and save yourself learning how to use the program the hard way. I messed around with it for about an hour on my own with varied results, before I finally did. In just a few minutes I had astounding results.

I tried doing a bicycle first (difficult), then gave up and tried a picture of a dog (easy) on my back steps. Bicycle - 1 hr invested with fair results.(actually better than I expected though) Dog - 10mins invested with a superior image to show for it!

Took me a little to get used to the available TOOLS (paint brush, fill, wand, etc), but I've never even used the MS-Paint program in the past for more than half-an-hour. Anyway, once I understood what they each did and finally realized what 'contour' was, things snapped into place very quickly.

My only complaints would be: 1)MUST have a GRAB hand to move around the zoomed in image. As it is, they rely on top/side slider bars and you really put the mileage on a mouse going back and forth to them all the time. 2)The Zoom feature is REALLY touchy. Would be nice if the Zoom Slider when all the way across the bottom of the screen for an easier adjustment, or perhaps have 2 Zoom Sliders.(i.e. a fine control & a rough control for image size)

Anyway even with those two small issues, I just bought the program via MacZOT for half price today. Without which, I would have NEVER tripped across it. A BARGAIN INDEED, as I know of no other programs out there that are so quick to learn, easy to use, and produce such incredible results for a total novice at this.

Decompose scores over Photoshop by having a brush to define the transitional edge ares where pixels may be foreground image or background. Rather than having to perform a very accurate selection, cut it out and then perform a lot of smoothing of the edges, in Decompose you make a quicker, broad-brush selection of the edge area, from which the app. calculates the border, removes the background to transparency and gives a smooth edge. It seems to work well even if there isn't a lot of contrast between foreground and background. Well worth the money to save time and effort -- and if you need to make good quality, foolproof cut-outs in a hurry, you'll thank the developers. It could do with some sensitivity controls, and a grab tool with a spacebar shortcut to navigate around the image, but this is only a v1.n and it lacks little in the way of refinement.