I just purchased the German version of Knockout 2 ^[1] which works as a plugin for Adobe Photoshop, Corel PHOTO-PAINT and Corel Painter as well as Corel Paint Shop Pro X.

So, what does it do?
It makes masking nice and easy!

Quote from the website:

(…) it lets you retain the finest image details, including hair, smoke, liquid, fire, glass and shadows. (end of quote)

And that, it does very well!

I have tried several times to separate a certain object from the background, but with the built-in functions of Paint Shop Pro, it just didn’t work without a lot of effort. With Knockout 2, it is easy as can be!

The only problem was that Paint Shop Pro X failed to import the mask after I was done with Knockout 2: it said “Plugin passed bad parameters”, and there was no mask imported.

Fortunately, I found the answer here ^[2] (quoting):

This error is a result of the initial image not having a separate layer from the background image. From within Paint Shop Pro 9 there must be a layer that is separate from the background that contains the image that is going to be edited in Knockout 2.

In Paint Shop Pro X

1) Right-click on the image in the layers palette and hit “Promote background layer”.

2) Then Knock it out with the plugin.

Yip, that worked fine.

For myself to look up if I forget (I am using the German version of Paint Shop Pro X):
Rechtsklick auf die Hintergrundebene in der Ebenenansicht, dann “Hintergrundebene umwandeln”, dann erst Knockout 2 aufrufen.