New After Effects Quick Tips! | How To Easily Key Hair Details With This Simple Trick

In today’s Quick Tip, we will take a look at tips and tricks on getting a good hair key for your green screen shot. This video will solely focus on pulling off thin hair details without any 3rd party plug-in.

Once you are finished with your key, you might want to add some elements to your shot! Get the best compositing ready VFX stock footage right here on ActionVFX.com

If you have any questions or comments about the tutorial, drop them below in this thread! We want to hear from you!

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Love this tutorial @danasa! Lots of time-saving tips in here.

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Damn, @danasa, that’s a great technique. How have I never encountered this before?

Considering I’m this guy, you can imagine you made my day!

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I went from “oh, it’s just a green screen tutorial“ to THIS IS GENIUS! Such a great idea @danasa!

Oh, and Mike, I love the merch!

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Haha that made me laugh! @triem23

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A rare shirt, indeed. FXhome sent those out to forum mods and brand Ambassadors for Xmas. i don’t even think FXhome staff have those sweet Hitfilm Pro shirts!

(Then we were all told not to wear them/show them publically until the logo switch went live in March)

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It’s a pretty awesome shirt! I was wondering where you got a hold of it. ActionVFX should start a merchandise lineup! :joy:

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And now you know!

Both ActionVFX and FXhome need some shirts/merch

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I create a green solid by sampling the green screen and position it in the stack above the plate. Then I set its blend mode to subtract and the entire image goes black. What am I missing?

Hello! Would you mind sharing a screenshot of your shot?

Also, the tutorial works best for brighter colored hair. if you have darker colored hair (dark brown or black) the technique may not work, because a dark colored hair already has low color values, so if you subtract the hair it would result in negative values (super black).

That said, we have another tutorial that covers exactly that; how to deal with dark hair:

Hope this helps!

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Looks like the problem is with the setup of the color space/gamma. With the current (see reference) settings, the screen becomes nearly black when subtracting the green solid. If I switch to a different color space/turn on linearize or Blend Colors with 1.0 Gamma, then the results are closer to those shown in the tutorial.

Cheers.

Hello my I don’t know what I am missing I followed the tutorial but I ended up with a


mask patch different color and my background was too light. please help me to figure it out.

Hello! You can try play around with the color correction to pull up the darkness a bit, and you can smooth out edges of your masks to make it blend better.

another thing that i’d suggest you do is to break up the masks into smaller chunks based on the brightness of the green screen. So one chuck of mask handling the darkest shade, another chunk for the lighter shade, and so on (example below).
this will help you getting more control on the keying!

hope this helps!

Thank you for the quick replay I think that would be helpful.