Thanks for all the responses. At least I know that I’m not just missing something.

Regarding magic software, we’ve had features like red eye reduction for years ... and I’ve seen some pretty amazing effects: object remove ... blending ... stitching ... content aware scaling. Even snap to objects surprises me sometimes about what it can “see”. So accurately isolating objects in an outline fashion certainly seemed feasible.

But given the realities of the current Xara feature, I’d like to see it changed it as follows:
  • use the current brush method to loosely mark the object and the background
  • have the software put up a dashed outline of the object it thinks it sees
  • let you adjust the outline in any way that's needed, using the same tools as you would use if you had created the outline

This would let the software accomplish what it can ... and the user easily take care of the more difficult instances. And as the software improved in each new version, the user would do less and less. Plus, it’s a merging of the editing methods.

In the meantime, I’ll go with the mask + outline method for most of my uses.

Thanks, again.