When you need a clean cut-out, two techniques dominate professional workflows: clipping paths and image masking. They solve the same problem — separating a subject from its background — but they shine in very different situations.
A clipping path is a hand-drawn vector outline made with the Pen tool. It is perfect for products with clean, well-defined edges: bottles, boxes, phones, furniture. Because it is a crisp vector, it scales infinitely and gives you a razor-sharp boundary.
Image masking, on the other hand, works at the pixel level. It is the right call for soft or complex edges — hair, fur, feathers, smoke, and anything translucent like glass or chiffon. A pen path simply cannot follow thousands of individual strands without looking cut out with scissors.
The rule of thumb: if you could trace the edge with a steady hand, use a clipping path. If the edge is fuzzy, wispy, or see-through, reach for masking. Many real jobs use both — a path for the body of the product and a mask for the tricky bits.
Still unsure? Send us a sample image and our team will tell you exactly which approach will give the cleanest result for your catalogue.
