Whats the secret to making leaf opacity Masks?

[cyphyr]

Every time I've made a mask for tree leaves I get white specking about the leaf (or often worse). So far the only leaves I've successfully been able to use are the ones that come with Xfrog  and the Ivy Generator. I've opened these up in Photoshop and I cant see any difference in their make up to the ones I'm creating. What am I missing? Whats the secret ?
Thanks
Richard

[Harvey Birdman]

I've had fair success working around this with the (old) free XFrog stuff by shaving back the edges of the mask so it doesn't extend quite to the edges of the leaves. That and clamping the mask to 1's and 0's - black and white, not gray-scale. The areas of partial transparency are problematic - I think you want the mask to be more digital than analog, know what I mean?

[Sethren]

If you have a photo editor that can read 8bf Files for Plugins download this. I find it works quite well for making clean masks for leaves and the like. It may not work all of the time but it's a nifty plugin for creating fine anti-aliased edges and you should be able to trim back the edges to a certain extent.

http://www.mehdiplugins.com/english/finethreshold.htm

[dhavalmistry]

I asked the similar question here....

http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=2484.0

[bigben]

Use a black back drop if your scanning/photographing leaves. Makes your life easier at the start.

[cyphyr]

YARG !!! Job done, thanks guys.
Actually the solution was so blinding obvious I had completely forgotten I had already done it earlier in the year. doh slaps head 
Since an alpha mask is being used theres absolutely no point in having any transparent or white areas on the colour image. I simple filled the blank problem areas with a mix of the highlights and shadows of the initial image and, voila, anything that was white is now rendered leaf coloured.
By the way, that plugin looks very useful. I've always had a problem when photographing leaves for textures of removing the shadow caused by the flash and cleaning up the image was always tedious, now easy.
Thanks
Richard

[dhavalmistry]

glad to help