Do Plugins work with Masks?

I have the Neat Image plugin and it works fine in PP. I have a macro with a bright, detailed flower image and considerable amount of out of focus area. There is some noise in the out of focus area that I would like to clean up but I don't want to smear the fine texture of the flower petals. I built a mask that covered only the brighter, in-focus portions of the flower, then ran Neat Image and purposely exaggerated the noise removal to be sure the masking effects would be visible. In the Neat Image preview it virtually destroyed the detail. Upon applying the changes and exiting NI the PP image showed that the mask was ignored, the detail in the flower was as damaged as in the NI preview.

Is there a setting or procedure that will make masks work with plugins?

Werner

Dear Werner,

It's me again ;-) Just tested the Neat Image with PP. The mask works fine for me. Please note that if you would like to protect e.g. the flower, then the flower must be masked out = black. It would be best if you mask the flower as usual and choose 'Mask inverted'. You can check your mask via 'Mask filled', then the flower should be black masked.
After that just call up the NI plugin via 'Processing resources' while the masking panel is still active and process...

Please let us know, if it works fine so?

Best regards

Hoang-Tran

Well that was pretty silly! I had it backwards... works fine when you do it right. That's a very powerful technique to control the unwanted side effects of noise reduction.

Thanks,
Werner