Tutorial 3: Inside/Outside Matting

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There are too many limits of bluescreen matting, most of our images can not meet its requirements. Compare to bluescreen matting, the 'Inside/Outside matting' is more applicable for common images.

The following picture can be found in 'sample' folder of software.

From the introduction of chapter 1, we know the program will treat the pixels in 'inside edge' as totally opaque and pixels out of 'outside edge' are totally transparent.

After the file opened, enter 'Inside/Outside matting' by click the button on wizard dialog. Then we use 'Inside tool', select inside of the object carefully, try to close to real edge as possible as you can. Don't select out of the real edge ,and exclude semitransparent part:

Some part, e.g ropes on wrist and the white pixels separated by the pigeon's eye, is hard to be included into inside edge. You can use 'Inside Injector' to add them as pixel samples:

After that, use 'Outside Tool' to select the outside edge:

Use subtract mode of 'Outside Tool' to subtract the holes:

After done, click 'Create', we get a coarse result:

There are some defects in circles. In next, we will fix them with touch up tools.

Defects at wing and hand: The foreground color is constant in these two place, so we can use 'Fore/Back separator' tool.

The foreground color of wing is close to white, set the tool at 'Add' mode, and set the foreground color and background color by click the inside and outside place. Choose a 'safe' brush with 'hardness=0%' and 'opacity=30%', appropriate radius. Paint the defect carefully. Press 'Ctrl_Z' if wrong.As following figure:

Use same way on defect of hand, change a smaller brush, set foreground color as its in other part of hand.

Defects at arm and pigeon eye: The shape here is simple, we can use 'Add to Selection' and 'Polygon Modify" tool pair. First, paint the defects to add it into.

And then cut the extra unwant part with 'polygon modify' tool:

Use these tools to fix the other defects. Sometime it maybe hard to fix all of them, for example, the top of the wing, we can use 'Eraser' with a safe brush(hardness=0%, opacity=30%) to discard some pixels by carefully painting.

Don't forget to check the result by different view-mode.Make sure it is fine for composition.

About composition, refer to last two tutorials.

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