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Raise brightness of subject while leaving background unaffected
Hi everyone; new to creative cow and new to after effects.
A colleague of mine shot some interview footage to be used in a corporate video. Unfortunately, the interview took place in front of a window on a very overcast day with limited indoor lighting. As a result the background is very blown out and the subject appears dark. I’m trying to separate the subject and the background so I can do some color correction on them individually, but I’m having some trouble. Can anyone suggest a good way to do this over 30 minutes of footage?
I know this may be a relatively simple question, but as I said, I’m new to after effects and am relatively unfamiliar with it.
Thanks a lot!
Mike -
1 Reply
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The obvious solution would be to reshoot. Painful and embarrassing, but the truth is that you’ll never be able to fully restore the footage to how it should have looked if the exposure setting was really off.
Having said that, you could apply the levels effect to a copy of the footage and crush the blacks / blow out the whites to make a matte. Apply colour correction to an adjustment layer and use the matte as a luma inv. matte. Only the underexposed parts of the footage will be affected by the adjustment layer. Add a fast blur to the matte layer to feather the transition from black to white.
To summarise:
Layer 1 – Footage, with levels applied. Eyeball off.
Layer 2 – Adjustment layer with desired colour correction, e.g. exposure.
Layer 3 – Raw footage.Simon Bonner
youtube.com/simonsaysFX
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