[Scott Johnson]

First, thanks for your help and the suggestions. I tried following the advice given, but I’m sure I’m just confused because I really couldn’t get a desired result. For example, I tried editing the Levels by color channel, but all I got were various color tints but the problems of bad lighting remained. I tried keying color, I tried keying luma, I tried toggling white balance, I don’t think I know what I’m doing here, and I looked for tutorials. (I usually use After Effects for compositing or animation, but I have less experience doing advanced color grading especially to fix problems.

So yeah, I ended up rotoscoping the girl, toggling the levels that way, then desaturating the background and toggling those levels. Here’s the result:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdVGTSj1oJY

What I like about it is the girl remains the focus while not being drowned out by the light from the window. Also, she’s not pumpkin orange, but still remains warm. I’m sure it can be better, but that’s about all I could figure. Maybe you know of tutorials or something to better explain your methods for future reference. But I wanted to post this as a follow up/conclusion.

– Scott

https://ytkidsvids.tumblr.com/

[Scott Johnson]

Thank you George for your replies and your help, I appreciate it. I was hoping for a faster solution. I don’t really want to rotoscope for the editing, but I might not have a choice. You mention alot about color, which is the main problem, but has technology advanced far enough to correct shadows ie: change the position of the lighting?

The fact that the light is below her instead of above her is an issue. Is there no way of correcting that? Maybe keying a color or something, idk?? Thanks

https://ytkidsvids.tumblr.com/

[Scott Johnson]

Ok, I’m redoing this video completely:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtqiINbUkoY

This is the best I could get it in Vegas:

https://i.imgur.com/C6FwJGh.jpg

It’s way to bright, but when I lower brightness the lighting issues show up. It’s the best I could do, I am looking for plugins and fixes, maybe do an outline cartoon version or something, I just don’t know..

Thoughts?

https://ytkidsvids.tumblr.com/

View post on imgur.com

[Scott Johnson]

Ok, well did you also get a chance to read the “Noise Removal” idea I posted in the other thread? Essentially instead of keying chroma it’s keying patterns (ie: get sample of “grass pattern” then delete all such patterns in the scene. Chroma will play a small part of this, so the grass pattern of the shadow area will be partially deleted without fully deleting the shadow. And of course a feather option would apply for smoothness).

I don’t know if After Effects can identify/key patterns within an image. But if it (or a 3rd party plugin) could, then that would greatly simply this process.

– Scott

https://ytkidsvids.tumblr.com/

[Scott Johnson]

Thanks for the reply. I tried Difference matte, but there’s vertical camera movement in the clip, also I don’t have a shot of the grass and background without the soldiers so I had to create such an image in Photoshop via the rubber stamp tool. Didn’t get the best results, it even caused distortion/grass noise on the soldiers themselves.

– Scott

https://ytkidsvids.tumblr.com/

[Scott Johnson]

https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/2/1050140

Thanks for the reply. The above forum contains information on the video in question that I am trying to edit. I think what I am saying is, why should a green screen or green background have to be near perfect for it to be used easily, quickly, and effectively. If you check out the video I am trying to edit, I don’t see a non-rotoscope way of doing this easily at all. But I figured if you can simply extract all pixels that utilize the green channel at a particular level, then that (along with feathering) might be an effective tactic and you follow it up with deletion of transparent pixels.

I could be wrong, but I’d really like to know a fast way of editing this without rotoscoping (or roto brush tool).

Scott Johnson