How To Retain Green Screen Shadows and Fine Details | After Effects Tutorial

hello everyone denasa here with action vfx in today's video i'm going to show you how to preserve dark details from your green screen blades these dark details like shadow and hair strands are very difficult to key out so in this tutorial we will focus on just that how to isolate green screen shadow and composite it back into your shot and then we will use that treatment that we had for keying shadow and use it to key out darker colored hair anyways without further ado let's get started okay so here is our composition here we have our green screen plate and then we have our background so king our main character here may be relatively more straightforward because there is a clear separation between him and the green background but our shadow here will be a bit more tricky because the shadow is a bit soft and a bit more blended to the background so to key out our shadow we want to separate the keys into two layers which is first is the key of just the character without the shadow and then the second is the key of the shadow without the character this tutorial will focus on the second key so i'm going to skip the first one okay so i already have the key of our main character here which i named the main key and as i have mentioned this is just the key of the character without the shadow so now let's get started on our shadow so first let's bring our all played back into the scene make sure to name it appropriately so let's go with shadow key and we want to make sure to put the shadow key below our main key so shadow is basically made up of two things the bright areas where there is no shadow and the darker areas which are the shadow so that's how we want to approach it we just need the information of this plate's luminance or brightness and thankfully we already have that because we have our shadow on top of a flat color like green screen so we already have that bright and dark information very clearly laid out but now we want to make it even clearer by adding tint boom now we have very clear display of what our shadow look like towards the background next what we're going to do is we want to make the separation between the shadow and our green screen a bit more contrast so let's get curve and then we want to bring the highlight points here and the shadow point here basically the more steep the angle of these two points the more contrast your layer will be so our goal is to make what was our green screen to be more closer to white and our shadow to be more closer to black without losing the softness of our shadow okay so this is pretty good our shadow is now more separated from the background but we still have some gray color on the back there and also our shadow is cropped by our plate resolution so let's fix that by masking only our shadow basically just the areas that we need and then we are going to feather it because we want a smooth transition on the edges and basically make sure the shape of our shadow is preserved okay so this is a pretty good simulation of what our shadow looks like so now we want to composite this shadow matte to the background one easy way to do this is just to turn this layer blending mode to multiply and boom very nice this will work most of the times but it is not as flexible especially if you want to add things like give the shadow a color or give it a bit more contrast or less contrast so i'm going to show you an alternate way a more proper way to composite shadow into a shot so the first thing we want to do is we want to first change this back to normal there we go and then get invert boom so now our shadow key color is inverted we have our shadow is now white and the background is now black and because the background is now black we will see a bit more clearly our edges is not properly fixed so let's fix that let's reduce the feather a little bit and then let's move the mask there we go looks so much better and then we are going to create an adjustment layer bring it below our shadow key and then we're going to change the track matte of our adjustment layer to luma matte towards the shadow key so now what's going to happen is our adjustment layer will only affect the area that was dictated as white or luma on our shadow key layer so let's add curves to our adjustment layer and then let's bring our highlight point down and there we go we have our shadow back so now the last thing we're going to do is we want to parent both of our shadow layers to our main key so now we can just move the main key layer around and the shadow will follow perfect so next we're going to do is we are going to apply this method to do another task which is preserving hair details this method will only work for darker colored hair so if you want to know how to do this method for a brighter colored hair you can check out my other hair king tutorial link on the description below so here we have our green screen blade of this woman with dark hair and then we have our background so just like before we need two key layers which is first our main key which is just a key of the woman without the tiny hair details and then the second one we will have the hair key which is just the hair details so we already have our main gear let's create our details key so i want to duplicate this plate and put the second one below and then for the second one we want to delete the key light and let's name this layer herky okay so let's solo this and then just like before i want to give it a tint and then a curve and then we want to once again create a contrast while still maintaining the hair details okay so this is good and then let's get invert there we go so now our hair is white and the background is black so now let's disable the solo so this is what we have and then of course we want to only mask the area of our hair because we don't want this gray stuff to also being brought back with the key so let's get our pen tool and start masking only the hair details area okay let's give it a feather great and then the next thing we're going to do is instead of creating an adjustment layer we're actually going to create a solid then we want our solid to have the same color as our hair so click this eyedropper tool and pick the hair color and then we are going to name this say hair solid okay and then we are going to bring it below our hair key and then we are going to go to the track mat of our hair solid and luma mat it to the hair key and now we have our solid filling in the white details on the shadow key layer so this is what we had before and this is after we brought back the details and that was the tutorial on how to preserve shadows and dark hair details on a green screen if you want to add some vfx elements on your green screenshot don't forget to check out our website at actionvfx.com at actionvfx we provide high quality vfx assets for your vfx needs we have fire explosions energy and many many others you can also sign up for our action vfx subscription starting at the low cost of 14.99 per month this is the most affordable way to access our library and you can cancel anytime no contract thank you so much for watching let us know in the comment section below what kind of tutorials that you'd like to see next and see you next time bye you

Channel: ActionVFX

Views: 10,965

Keywords: adobe after effects, after effects, green screen, shadow, hair, details, hair keying, how to key hair

Id: T8FSeBRx6Rc

Length: 8min 43sec (523 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 10 2021