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JUNE 04, 2002 When Compositing Gets Hairy
The composite All right. Three days later, you have your perfect mask. And then you go to plop it onto your new background, and what happens? [an error occurred while processing this directive] Fringe. Oh yes, fringe, the age-old nemesis of the compositor. It's the halo you see around your hair that''s essentially light spill from your original image. Fringe causes two problems for you: First, obviously, it's ugy. But second, it reveals inconsistencies in lighting and coloration between your foreground and background images, when you'd much rather have the two blend more naturally. 
Of course, Photoshop includes in its arsenal of tools a function to defringe a layer automatically. It does this by replacing the fringe color with neighboring colors. But, far too often, this just makes the image look worse, particularly when you're trying to deal with the subtle tonalities of human hair. The same is true of the Remove Black Matte and Remove White Matte command. (All of these are located in the Layer menu.) A solution that I've found works well in most situations is to select the fringe areas of your foreground area, cut them and then paste them onto a new layer, changing the blending mode to darken or multiply, depending on the situation. Once you've done this (or instead of doing this), you can also go into your layer blending mode options (Layer > Layer Style > Blending Options...) to add a little fine tuning to the blend. You can adjust the individual channels in the blend in at the bottom of the Blending Options dialog. Notice that dragging the slider values in the "This Layer" slider does not produce any subtlety whatsoever. To make the blend more subtle, hold down your Option key and select the value marker on the right, as seen in the illustration below. 
All right. So I haven't solved all of your compositing problems, but these tips should help alleviate some of the manual labor involved in masking out complex subjects. If you have further questions or techniques of your own, be sure to visit us in the Photoshop user forum here at Digital Media Net. Contact the author: Dave Nagel is the producer of Creative Mac and Digital Media Designer; host of several World Wide User Groups, including Synthetik Studio Artist, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe InDesign, Adobe LiveMotion, Creative Mac and Digital Media Designer; and executive producer of the Digital Media Net family of publications. You can reach him at dnagel@digitalmedianet.com. Prev 1 2 3 Related sites: • Creative Mac • Digital Media Designer • Digital Producer • The WWUG Related forums: [an error occurred while processing this directive] 
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