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The best Compositing overview you’ve ever seen, from our very own Simon Ubsdell
While I’ve posted this in the admin section of the forum, I wanted to draw your attention to this one in particular because Simon is so very much “one of us”, and because we’re nerds, and as much as any tutorial I’ve ever seen by anyone, this one is about the joy of being a nerd, and the glee that comes from understanding the math that underlies…I was going to say “software operations”, but what I really mean is THE UNIVERSE.
Without further ado, allow me to introduce:
Compositing Secrets Everyone Can Use: Pt. 1 – Blend ModesThe emphasis is on “everyone”, because as Simon notes in his introduction to this,
We tend to think of editing as putting one thing after another, but actually many of us spend a lot of “editing” time putting things on top of other things – and every time we do that we are compositing. Because there are so many different processes we can use for “putting things of top of other things”, we can easily get ourselves confused and end up with unpredictable artifacts. Understanding some of the simple principles that make up the compositing process can really help to simplify things for us and make for better and quicker results.
He continues:
What I hope is distinctive and useful about the approach I am taking is that it’s not about the “how”, but rather the “what” and the “why” – there are plenty of resources that show you what buttons to push but my hope would be that understanding what’s happening at ground level when you push those buttons is going to help you make better decisions.
Plus the nerd in me just finds this stuff fascinating. I had a huge light bulb moment when I first started using Shake and realised that it let you see right through to the bare metal and work with the actual nuts and bolts, rather than dealing with graphical abstraction.
Suddenly I saw that it really was all just numbers and you could directly change the numbers and affect how they interact and do all sorts of amazing stuff that is either much harder to do via a top-heavy UI, or quite simply not possible at all. From that moment I was hooked and I’d love for others to share that same eureka moment!
This is very exciting stuff, and I’m very happy to be able to share it with you! Lots of great stuff ahead too, including a teaser for Pt. 2: Alpha Channels.
Please enjoy!
Regards,
Tim Wilson
Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW -
1 Reply
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Fascinating to see the maths at work. Looking forward to actually understanding alpha even though I work with it often.
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