Keying without green screen

[Ridley Walker]

You can use any of the keying tools to make the white transparent. Just use the eyedropper in the keying effects control panel to pick white as your key color.

Linear Color Key should work if the background is pure white, if not use Keylight and if necessary a Matte Choker.

[Spencer Tycksen]

Thank you for the response Ridley. I think I got thrown off because when I tried to use Keylight, it wouldn’t work. I just tried it again with keylight and still had no luck. Color Key did work however, so thanks. I feel dumb that I didn’t try it before. I guess I figured if it wouldn’t work with Keylight, then…

Do you know how to make it work with Keylight?

[Darby Edelen]

Some of the Key effects use differences in the color channels to achieve the key (Keylight, Color Difference Key, etc.) and these won’t work in this case. You could use some of the other Key effects but you don’t really need to.

Since you have what appears to be a black/white image already you basically have a matte, you just need to shift that matte from the RGB into the Alpha channel. You could do this in several ways:

1) Create a new black solid below the image, set it to use the top image as a Luma Inverted Track Matte.

2) Create a new black solid, apply the Set Matte effect, point it to the image and take matte from Luminance.

3) Apply the Shift Channels effect to the image and set Take Alpha From to Luminance.

Those are just a few other options.

Darby Edelen

[Vishesh Arora]

Spencer

I would like to add some more ways to key white color:

1. Using Luma key.

2. Using Channel Combiner and Remove Color Matting.

Vishesh Arora
3D and Motion Graphics Artist
Films Rajendra

Blog:
https://digieffects.wordpress.com

2011 3D Demo Reel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHPgIJU_BR8