Lessons

Lesson Info

Green Screen Compositing

This is really big now um for portrait photographers for high school yearbook photographers people that are doing that kind of work to just do some snapshots snapshots yeah what's a snapshot anymore right you know it's a twelve fourteen eighteen megapixels um so they're just doing stills against green screen so they can then composite their talent into any background or environment or school logo or put another you know pose of themselves in there and it used to be a lot more of a process and yes there are some plug ins for photo shop that great prime at from from digital anarchy is a great plug in for photo shop and it's you know it's great those guys have done a great job with that a lot of people use that but through the years I've been doing blue screen and green screen for like twenty five years and in the early days when we just had you know the basics of after fax and photoshopped actually before before after effects I was using photo shop with a plug in from ultimate uh called ...

photo fusion on going way back but it would do blue screen and green screen primarily blue screen then composites for you is pretty complicated process and then through the years they've gotten better and better and then when adobe got key light to go with aftereffects it really changed a lot um and but it's still there still things in there that require some work. So let me go toe one here on example, and let me just show you that process, and I'm gonna show you the old way and then the new way, so that way, you know, what's going on so here's key light could add that to it. And this is how we've been doing it. Well, we, me, me, myself and I and first click looks pretty darn good, but I could get in there and I can see I've got some noise. I've still got some green spill, and I may have to, uh, do a little bit more work on the mat here. I've got some other shadows that are happening out here in the background. So what I'd have to do is come up here to my screen, matt, and then I look at the black in the white in here, in this area, look and see oh, yeah, I've got some noise out here, so let me look at my screen. Matt here I'm going to clip this black up a bit, okay? So that noise goes away. See how sharp my edges are here around the hair. Do I have much spill going on in here? Do I see any ghosting I may bring the white level down just a bit and that may give me a better key but I'm looking at my intermediate results here and I see you have still got some green in there even though the transparency is in there I'm still going to have to mess with that some um and so I may come in here to uh my foreground color correction edge color correction after going there and after tweak all of these these different things to try tio knock that out where I have to come in there with another plug in and tried to clean things up and get a get a little better key out of that. So anyway that's what we've had to deal with and it takes quite a bit of time it takes quite a bit of effort and some experience in knowing which ones to do when and what not to overdo it so let's delete this little guy here and still by looking at our presets here for key just type in the word key if I look here under these animation presets on says here image util ladies uh there's this one here which is if I can spread that out enough so we can actually read it it's called key light plus key cleaner plus advanced spill suppressor what that does is it says ok, I'm going to add those in that order to your image so if I just double click that or drag it over then I'm going to be able to add key light plus the new key cleaner plus the advance bill suppressor all in sequence there and it's going to do it all in one shock so let's get this back out where we can see and I'm just going to double click it and you're going to say, wow, it did absolutely nothing that's because we haven't selected the green yet it has to know what green we're going to use so I still have to come out here and grab the green a little eyedropper say that that's the green boom that's done okay, so it's like but jeff, I'm still seeing green around her hair that's because by default the key cleaners on there but advanced bill suppressor isn't yet so I'm going to go and turn on the advance spill suppressor and I'm going to see that I've got a really nice edges I've got the transparency and the details of the hair and without doing anything else, I've got a pretty decent case let's see what it looks like over some other footage it's like wow ok that's pretty darn nice that's nice on a background I could use that in an advertisement or whatever um I'd go ahead and use that the nice thing is is if you are doing print work and you want to do ah quick key then bring your image in at its full resolution I think I did that with this one let me see where my compass settings no, that was already did a video um but you can bring your copy and like I should with the uh the guy doing the animation is able to bring that in on dh and leave it at its full resolution so if I had a high resolution snapshot then I do this I believe these were actually taken from uh raw files from a black magic cinema cam so I've got two different variations on it here but you could take that I could move her around or I can export it as a psd and then I'd have those layers to go right back to photo shop and then be able to do what I want to in there. So if I was doing this for an advertisement or something I needed you know my background I needed her stripped out the background I needed done cleanly I needed to be it'll change backgrounds or I just couldn't shoot on white and get that much clarity and still have control over my talent then I would have to you know, the only way around that so what I can also do to make that look a little better is come up here and do some of my color correction and again because I do a lot of old school techniques um and this one this was shot in the video mode on the black magic cinema cam and I think in most cases with that color space that it uses is a little bit tio a little too harsh it's a little bit too saturated so what do you do if you got some oversaturated go to hugh saturation right? Um use what I use in photo shop so here I go in he saturation I can pull down my saturation a little bit I can play with some of my um uh play with this a little bit so what's don't want her to go green but I can't come up here and play with my reds and maybe ramp that a little bit differently maybe play with the saturation of that pull that down a little more I can bring my, uh science just a little blues bring that up a little bit because on her shirt to kind of pop I just need to cool her off a little bit because she's too hot that's my wife so I can see that that's my wife um she's a great model and she's a great sport she puts up with a lot a lot of me he isn't her for stuff but there's before and after so I really I just wanted to color balance her so that she more closely lives in the environment of what I'm composited her against and that's that's how quick it issue could do that right in here again I could just not do that bring those out to photo shop it's photoshopped layers and do my color corrections there as well but if you don't want to go back and forth between photo shop and uh aftereffects then you can you can do with those same controls here um another variation on this is too take the film mode which is really a flat color here and we look at that and we go wow how can you do anything with that because in the past to color key that was really a kind of a night married I would have to actually go in there you know kind of you know compress things re color it a bit and then key from that because it gave me more delineation of my color space is pretty flat but I don't have to with this new system typing key dumai magic here let's grab this and there's that now I can come in here and turn off my background layers so I've seen against white I know what I'm looking at a little bit of green in their return my skill suppressor on done so that's two extremely different shots you know same lighting but two different film moser color modes in the same camera so if I want to say let me do it um oops yeah auto color here we go I rarely do auto color, but I know this will get me close to what I want on dyken blend it back down so that kind of gives me a little closer in my color space where I want to be but also brightens everything up so if you just want that one click wonder type of thing this's really a quick way to get there now again like I I cover a lot in my book is it's about production? Um you've got to get a good get a good shot, get a good key, get good lighting good background materials on all of that if without good production techniques and standards and getting everything scope, I don't care how much great software you have, you're gonna have to deal with crap so garbage in his garbage out but just dealing with color space especially red cam black magic cinema cam, you're going tohave really, really great results with with this process here so let's, take a look at let's see another background that I've got here of the two different styles that one we'll have that turned off that's why so again? If you're using filters on your for fixing your color and your saturation that gives you the latitude to go in and make corrections later on if your background changes again that's where if you're doing this for print instead of video or film then probably better to take it from this point it's just uh it's just here and it exported for photo shop actually let's do that real quick we've got time so I come up here to render this out now since this is just a still image it's not video it's not animation I don't need to worry about how long it is how long is the conference and I just want to render the one frame so I'd come up to composition and then save frame as and then photoshopped layers and that's going to give me exactly what I want photoshopped layers so let's do this as just a just so I know what I'm looking at on save their we ggo all right, so let's hide after fax and we'll go out here and this is file here there they are yea there's all our layers so I've had I've got a couple in here that I had done previously just messing around there's my backgrounds and again it came with the color correction that I already gave them, so if I left him alone um then I'd have, you know I'd have that that latitude to do my color correction in here a little harsh there that was a little softer um so but at this point because it was a video file it's going to come in with ease guidelines in the air already these these guides so you need to get rid of those unless you want to keep them title safe and and motions safe guides in there if you are just doing it in its native resolution which was, you know, be like a you know, twelve or fourteen megapixel filed and it won't come in in his video mode, but at this point I can do anything I would normally do and photo shot bring her in at my text do whatever that I've got my print nice thing about doing it this way is even if I had video uh but I needed you know, the client said they wanted to have okay, we need to be able to make an advertisement as well as the video and we've gotta have, you know, a single frame from this or say you've you've got an interview or a talking head for production or commercial or some kind of promotional piece and you've got the talking head there, you've got to grab one frame of that talking head on the green screen and then for the pro appease pull him out of the green screen and then put them in to the background again, there's a lot of times people want to cross over print in video printing video print video, so in this case something like this you've got to shoot high hi res high definition it's really important to be able to do that now again with four k you got a lot more latitude to do that so if you're working in four k workflow on dh somebody says hey, we need a full page ad from that chances are you're going to be a little more successful being able to give them a frame from four k footage then you will something that's like seven twenty p standard h d so so that's really important but if you are still shooter and your student or stills against green screen and you want just a really quick and easy way tio to keep it out then this this new workflow in aftereffect sisi is really, really been dynamite so um I am going to be done with the green screen portion at this point unless we've got questions in the queue for the green screen uh let me know when all we did and I'm gonna run this question by it ok and it actually kind of talks about one of your previous classes okay I'm wanting to know in your previous class remember if you went over the old green screen key lights green screen delights me the key light plug in it yeah yeah oh yeah okay yeah that's that that's in both the beginning or class and the fundamentals great cause one of our uses using c s six and just wanted enough they yeah I think the very first program I worked on even look in the catalog but I think there is a c s six class in there I think was another adobe week like this one yeah and I think that was all cs six but really what that c s six or c c that part hasn't changed at all that's still the same so the same work flow right up until yesterday the work flow has been the same since you know c s five five or six so that part is his hasn't changed so you're still using key light and yeah I do cover that extensively and some of my other classes perfect thank you so with that said I'm going tio see if my other examples in here um I want tio I want to talk about a couple things and we may end a little bit early tonight I kind of powered through that that session and also my my one example for the stabilization kind of tanked on me there um I want to kind of lead into this other workshop but before I do that I want to talk about the downloads, the items that they'll be able to get when they purchased this program. One of the things that I've included in here eyes going to be this keyboard shortcuts reference guide now I can open this with see if we got safari on here I never go. Yeah, right there that that come on open. So what? This is it's it's all localized? You know, you have to be online to read this because I included the the docks in the folder there. So you get all these great keyboard shortcuts cross reference in here. Anything you want to know about keyboard shortcuts in aftereffect. Cc is in here, and if anybody was to be ableto dictate the's all verbatim, that includes adobe employees. Why? I'd really like to shake their hand because there are so many crazy crazy shortcuts in here it's insane. But this whole cross reference guide I'm giving you and then all of the projects that we worked on today, the ones that I didn't destroy by going in there and tweaking all the projects we worked on today, I'm going to give you a cz well, so right after the class going to clean up that folder, and we're going to make that available to you as well so that you can watch this video again and then be able to go through there and say, stop the video. I got to see what he's doing, going to go in there and open up that that project so all the projects I really worked through today are going to go in there so they'll be able to do a hands on, and I find that's really valuable for people. It's. You, really, when you're watching the video, you will have it side by side, right? And of course, the greatest thing about purchasing is, you're pausing the video, and then you're playing with it and going back so that's, wonderful, right? And then those key commands. Yeah, that's, helpful people what's the key command for, you know, this and that it's like, well, you got to put your leg over your neck and then hold your hand. You know, there's all these crazy key key commands that were just insane in there.