I’ve got Cutout 8, given away in February 2023, and I’m not really sure why. Probably because it was a giveaway, & I could spare the roughly 650MB of disk space, because I just don’t see how or why it would be useful today in actual work. Franzis does have an app called SmartMask11, which looks like a step in the right direction, while Cutout 10 Pro *may* be current with today’s tech – it advertises that it uses neural networks, but how & why is a bit of a mystery, as that’s perhaps the only software on their site without a manual to download.
The premise of Franzis Cutout is replacing the background in a photo. For playing around a simple copy paste *might* be OK, but today, when it seems everyone’s seen deep fakes online, posting an obvious cut & paste job will likely result in ridicule. Lighting, shadows, colors, & perspective all need to match if it’s going to look anywhere near realistic. You can try doing a convincing job using one of the AI image generators, or you can do it yourself in a decent photo editing app, even picking up a bit of assist from AI, using the Stable Diffusion plug-in to access Stable Diffusion &/or DALL-E 2 [it’s available for P/Shop, GIMP, & probably works in others]. And in that case using Cutout’s plugin [not available in Cutout non-pro] could possibly be an advantage, *IF* it can compete with the editing app’s built in tools. Cutout 10 *might* -- Cutout 8 Pro was probably OK in 2018, but today, not so much.
Drilling down to basics, Cutout is a selection app [& plugin]. A selection app &/or tool marks the boundary between the selected object or area & the rest of the photo, so that you can do something to or with the selected part of the photo. That could mean editing or adjusting that portion of the image [or everything else], moving it somewhere else, like onto another background, or making it disappear. Most tools work to find the edge or boundary by looking for a change in color, sometimes assisted by AI, e.g., PSP 2023, & sometimes the AI itself can recognize objects like people or the sky and select them all on its own, e.g., Photoshop. In Lightroom you can automatically select a person, then limit that selection to several predefined parts, e.g., hair or eyes etc. As you might guess from Adobe spending a huge amount of money & resources on AI selection tools, making selections plays a Very prominent role in photo editing.