For those just beginning their journey into the compositing art world, the task of blending your cutouts into the scene is one of the first and most important challenges. Nothing screams “amateur” like a cutout with hard unblended edges. After failure to color balance to match the scene, not blending or softening the cutout edges is a top priority in compositing.
Now if you are painting, and you paint very illustratively, this may not be an issue for you. Painter will pull their edges with the paint brush or mixer and blend them into the background, especially if they are painting fur or feathers. But if you are compositing photo-realistic scenes and need elements sharp but blended, you need a technique to feather them into the scene so they look like they belong there.
In this video I going to demonstrate two different techniques. The first is an edge feathering and blur technique that you perform on the cutout itself. The second technique you perform on a mask. The video is almost 12 minutes but covers 2 techniques. Hope you enjoy!
Note: If you go back in time on my blog you will find a post on two technique I discussed for blending your edges. The first one in that post is the same technique demonstrated here. The second one talks about using the mixer brush on your edges to blend them into your finished background. I have abandoned that technique and no longer use it or recommend it. WHY.. because it causes issues with haloing later in the composite when you modify lighting and add environmental effects like haze or dust or fog to your scene. It ended up causing more issues than it solved.
Galleries: The Pixel Mixer. Fine Art America.
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