Software Masking Options, Not Adobe or On1

[russellsnr]

Hi, I am looking or a software other than Adobe or On1 Photo Raw that can select a very difficult background, I shoot a lot (almost all) my images of small birds in a wooded area with lots of trees, ferns, brambles etc so erected a camouflage netting to try and tone it all down but still need to darken just the background and lighten the bird along with what it is perched on I have tried On1 Photo Raw 2022 also Adobe Lightroom (cloud based option) On1 compared to Lightroom is well down the park when trying to use auto select options and the Lightroom I have does not even allow you open with other software except Photoshop of course.
So looking for suggestion for software that will auto mask a bird or the very messy background only, really don't need all the bells and whistle software maybe just a stand alone that can do this.
Am tempted with the new On1 2023 option so if anyone has got that and can give an honest opinion not motivated by how much you get if you have a YouTube channel or own the company would appreciate it. Thankyou, Russ.

 

[Brownie]

I don't use any of those programs and I have no idea what their features are. What I can tell you is that Darktable has an extremely powerful masking tool. In this case, you'd mask the bird itself then invert the mask so the changes affected only the background. Darktable is free, powerful, and heavily supported open-sourced software. It has a learning curve, but if you're familiar with the other programs it shouldn't take too long.

I recently started to use Affinity but haven't yet gotten into it deep enough to know how effective it would be in this case. It supposedly has a smart tool that you use after masking to clean up edges. Not recommending it because I don't know, just putting it out there.