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This is cool. As a non-photo editter, can someone explain to me this statement?

"the user (c) interactively aligns the model to the photograph and provides a mask for the ground and shadow"

What is a mask for ground and shadow and how hard is it to develop one?

A mask in photoediting is usually a gray scale image that is white where you want to remove things and black where you want to keep things and often is in-between where you want soft edges.

To create these in photoshop you can use the magic wand tool and it selects things with similar colors. But you can create these types of masks in a variety of ways.

that means the user marks the boundary of the object to be manipulated, the rest of the image (including the object's shadow) will be treated as the background. This separation is called a mask in image processing lingo.

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