Keying and Color Correction: in which order?

[Roland R. kahlenberg]

You shouldn’t want to tweak the green’s unless its meant to help in the keying process … . So, it’s best to key first then grade the footage.

HTH
RoRK

Intensive mocha & AE Training in Singapore and Other Dangerous Locations

Imagineer Systems (mocha) Certified Instructor
& Adobe After Effects CS6 ACE

[Stephen Norrington]

Thanks for the speedy response. I’ll create a master reference grade and use that as a guide for grading all the elements after they’ve been keyed. Nice one, appreciated.

Stephen Norrington

Artproject Independent Production

[Todd Kopriva]

I agree with Roland.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
After Effects quality engineering
After Effects team blog
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[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

Like Roland and Todd I key first and grade after. I normally use at least two passes- one on the individual layers to bring everything to similar values and then a overall grade on an Adjustment layer on top to blend all elements.

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist

[Stephen Norrington]

Thanks for the thoughts, I was confused by the elements I have because they are rather inconsistent (green screen color variations and the grading on the photographed content changes shot to shot) but seeing how my material “breaks down” a bit when color-corrected first then keyed I’m gonna do what you do: key first then use per-element CCs, then adjustment layers for overall shot CCs – cheers 🙂

Stephen Norrington

Artproject Independent Production

[Adam Greenberg]

IMO, color grading is the last step, but sometimes you need to do both, so before and after. I can’t say if that will work with every case, but the fact is, sometimes you get footage that unfortunately was not shot optimally.

I can remember a specific case where we had no choice but to adjust the color in order to get a better key. And on top of that, the method we ended up using was quite complex, where we only used the result as a matte, etc. etc. etc… which gave us slightly more options than you can achieve using the standard method. Then when we were happy with the result, we tweaked the colors again to better match the footage we were keying on top of.

So, to conclude, you cannot really color grade the footage before the key, because changes to that footage, will likely affect your key result

1. adjust color if necessary

2. key

3. color grade

[Alex Booth]

Going through this right now and just thinking to myself, can’t we color grade to whatever gives us the best key then just use that key as an alpha matte for your raw footage to then be color graded after?