I think using the predefined “Animal”-preset sometimes is too challenging for the system. In fact, especially leopards sometimes are extremely difficult to spot i real life. Often it is only their tails that of some reason have difficulties to control when they try to hide in the trees. Often it just hangs right down and betrays them
Leopard in an Acasia in the Serengeti Plains.
In this case the preset did not work and that is why DXO even have provided the maybe best tool of them all and that is the possibility to just hoover over the areas of interest and click one or a few times to fix it. Extremely useful with pictures like this.
Just a couple of clicks with “Add a selection” activated and then a fine tuning with the Local Adjustment Brush - both adding mask as is or refining with the Alt-key pressed down. Sometimes even Auto Brush is to prefer and even that can be used to delete with the Alt-key. If one likes to add submasks that can be done too with pressing the Shift-key.
A Chetah example from a rehab centre in Mpumalanga in South-Africa. Here they took care of injured animals that had got injured in traps and cubs that had lost their mothers. No lions just Cheetahs, Caracals, Servals and Wild Cats.
Even here a miss with a much bigger “animal area” to work with. I just don´t know why because the presets seem to use a bigger AI-model that takes seconds why the hoovering method is just instant and never seems to cause any problems like temporary locks or wait states etc. Also note that it has always been when using the presets that I have experienced my rare moments of crashes. Never with the “hoovering” method of automatic masking.
With the free hand masking method, it was instant and just took two clicks to fix. The left back foot was missed and took an extra click.
Finally, an example where the preset “Animals” worked. Here we can emphasize sharpening and in the “Background”-mask we can add some blur instead if we like.
Finished result
“Animals” failed even with this Caracal-picture which is pretty bad. I think DXO has some more work to do here. Still wondering why, the free hand method works even here instantly.
I have to say I prefer the free hand method to the use of the premade presets because it opens for a much more natural and faster workflow. I just love it because it is much more effective too. It is good that the presets exist for beginners but for seasoned users the free hand method is just so much better. There are situations where I still after using Capture One AI-masking for years with the free hand method that works there too sometimes prefer the preset masks when retouch portraits. In C1 we got presets just recently for the eyes Iris and Sclera and using them is far more effective than doing it like in Photolab by free hand, since there are no presets for that yet in Photolab.
So my recommendation for you that still are glued to the preset metafor is to just leave it and use the free hand automatic method instead, like Keith already have suggested. Aborting part of your workflow all the time for the AI-menues is just ineffective and mostly totally unnessessary. Just study some videos about Advanced Masking in Photolab 9. The ones I have seen have been very helpful.
If a preset fails there is always a possibility to fix it on free hand. I have never seen it fail completely yet.
