• Adobe After Effects

  How to highlight the foreground and darken the background?

  Posted by Austin Steele on December 6, 2009 at 2:08 pm

  I’m a bit of an AE noobie so I’m looking for a tutorial preferably.

  I have a bunch of photos and want to do the effect where you highlight the subject (a person) and darken the background. Its common in a lot of trailers or opening credits.

  There’s often some 3D motion involved to give it a cool look. Any links? Thanks!

  Something like this (but not black): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1uJ7OExp60

  Michael Szalapski replied 16 years, 9 months ago 3 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  Todd Kopriva

  December 6, 2009 at 8:59 pm

  To isolate the foreground from the background in a movie that wasn’t shot against against a solid-color background, you’ll probably need to do some rotoscoping—drawing and animating masks to define the foreground objects. Then you can use those masks in a number of ways. To apply a color correction to the foreground but not the background, you can use the masks on an adjustment layer and have the color correction effects on the adjustment layer.

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  putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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• 

  Michael Szalapski

  December 7, 2009 at 12:47 am

  For how to get that 3d notion do a search on The Kid Stays In The Picture.

  – The Great Szalam
  (The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

  No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

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