How To Easily Key Hair Details With This Simple Trick | ActionVFX Quick Tips

hello everyone denasa here with action vfx in today's quick tip video i'm going to show you a trick on how to isolate hair details from a green screen every green screenshot is different so this trick may not work for every shot but nonetheless i hope you will learn a thing or two about keying from this video anyway without further ado let's get started okay here we have our green screen plate that i got from our friend at red giant and here we have our background from hdri heaven and our 3d camera that is tracked from the plate as you can see from our plate it will be difficult to key out these hair details because the color is very vain and the pixels are small so what we want to do is to have the main key which is just the main silhouette of our character and then we want to do the hair details separately so here is the key of my main silhouette just the character without hair details as you can see i skipped this process here because i want to focus this tutorial on the hair so next let's do that let's get the key for the hair so we are going to have a new composition with our plate here and basically this is where we will create our hair key let's create a new solid and color pick a green pixel that is close to the hair and now we have a flat constant color of that green on top of our plate and then go to the blending mode of the solid and select subtract so what we have here is our plate being subtracted by the color value of our solid the green is being subtracted leaving the details of the hair in red which is what we want if your subtractions doesn't give you an immediate clean result you can color correct the solid using curve and play around with the individual rgb channel until you get rid of all the green and leave out the pixels that belong to the hair so we get a clean key of the hair on the right side but there are still some color on the left side of the plate that's because the green on that side has a slightly different shade than the one that we picked so it's a leftovers pixel that is fine we will deal with that later so what we want to do now is to just mask our solid on the area where we get a clean key for the hair great next let's get the key from the left side of the hair using the same process but different color so create a new solid select the shade of green on that other side subtract and then once again color correct it a bit to clean it up and then mask it again basically here you want to keep getting new solids and slowly subtracting the green pixels away from the hair details for this shot i ended up only needing two solids to get a clean key of the hair once you are done you want to pre-cum solids and in the pre-cums turn them all back to normal and then we want to add another green layer at the bottom just to even out the entire composition and go outside the pre-comb and then turn the solid pre-comb to subtract so now we have the combination of our green solids subtracting the plate all at once okay we have our hair isolated let's go back to the main comp and bring in our hair key composition and then let's change the blending mode to add and now we have autumn hierarchy merged with our main key layer then let's get a hue saturation and colorize it play around until you get the original color of the hair back and now here you can see we are getting close to what we want however we still have our hair composition layer meshing up the entire color of our composition to fix this we can put the hair key below the main key and then mask only the area of the hair this is the easy method however the problem with this you may or may not be getting a good blending between the hair and the head's edges another way to do this is to put the hair on top instead of below the main key and you want to mask just the area of the hair strands and then feather it this method is a bit of work but it will make sure your edges are blending perfectly and there you go after you finish with your key you may want to add some elements into your shot you can get those elements from actionvfx.com action vfx provide high quality assets for your vfx needs we have fast library of compositing ready stock footage such as fire explosions energy to people and many many others we also have free assets that you can get on the website right now thank you so much for watching if you have your own green screen tips and tricks or questions you can leave a comment below or visit our forum at forum.actionvfx.com where you can share your work ask questions or just have fun discussions with other artists and filmmakers once again don't forget to subscribe and see you on the next tutorial

Channel: ActionVFX

Views: 7,165

Rating: 4.9915967 out of 5

Keywords: actionvfx, tutorial, green screen tutorial, green screen hair, hair keying, how to key hair, keying tutorial, hair matte, keylight, additive keyer, hair keyer, hair strands, keying, adobe after effects

Id: osQd0XAqbj4

Length: 5min 37sec (337 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 03 2021