unless you want this sort of unrealistic look a lot of times when you're using green screen footage, you'll want to add a background and put the foreground element, whether it's a dog, it's a person, whatever it is in that situation and try to make it look realistic. So let me delete this red solid. Go back to our project, take the grassy hill, jpeg image and drag it beneath our dog. Okay, so that doesn't look too good. So we want to move this around and reposition it. Let me take our selection tool, bring up scale, drop the scale, something like so and now we need to adjust the size of the dog to match the size of our background. So I'll take our dog, which I can rename dog here, bring upscale, drag it down, something that looks a little bit more natural and then bring this down so it looks like pup is sitting on the ground. Something like that looks pretty darn good. So that's the first thing is just playing with the sizing of your background and foreground elements to make sure it m...

atches. This is another area where I see a lot of beginners making mistakes. The next is playing with the color correction of our foreground or our background to make sure it matches this foreground element, The lighting wasn't perfect. And so it's really orange. So if we go into our effects controls, there's actually some foreground color correction tools within the key light effect that we can play around with. So first drop that down and then click enable color correction. We can decrease the saturation, which that in itself seems to be helping a lot. It's not too warm and we're still getting sort of like that color. This husky is mostly sort of a black and white brown dog and then the contrast, we want to make sure that we're matching the contrast of our foreground to the background and the background looks a little bit more contrast e than our dog. So I'm going to just bring this up just a little bit in this situation, I've placed this dog in this shadow of the tree, so decreasing the brightness, can kind of give that look as if it's in the shade, but I'm going to show you a different way to do that to make it look a little bit more organic in just a second. The last thing you might want to do is open up the color balancing tab and this is how you can play around with the color balance. So if we increase the saturation just a bit, I know I just decreased it, but just increase it and then we play with the hue, let me just go crazy with it. So if I increase the saturation a lot and then I play with the hue, you can see what's happening. So I might want to add a little bit, it was a little too warm, so I'll add a little bit of coolness to it, so something like blue like that, but I'll bring back our saturation, maybe a little bit too cool, just rotate it to warm now, Something like that looks pretty darn good to 31 and 5.1, So that's how you can color correct your foreground footage right within the key light, 1.2 effect. What if I want to add that sort of shadow to the front of this dog? Here's what I would do. There's different ways to do this, but here's just what I would do, duplicate your dog, I'm going to call this shadow. So remember, duplicate his command d right click go to layer style and choose color overlay. This basically makes this dog all red drop down the color color overlay settings, change the red to black. Now, what I want to do is drop the opacity, not here, under color overlay, but of this shadow itself. So with shadow selected, press t to bring up opacity and drop that opacity. So now we're getting a more natural shadow on top of the dog that matches the shape of the dog. But I want to actually bring in this mask a little bit more to make it a little bit more organic. So if I take the mask path or click on the shadow, I can bring in this mask, so you can see maybe I want the shadow to start right here, you know, you see the dog, you see the shadow from the tree, it kind of comes along here, so maybe something like so might be good. Now this is a harsh shadow, so I want to feather out this mask something like so the cool thing is now as the dog moves up and then if the dog puts his head down there we go, it looks like it's coming in and out of the shadows which just looks a little bit more natural. Okay so there you see the dog head is down in the shadow up, it's in the sun and that kind of makes sense if there was light shining through the trees right around here. One thing that I haven't touched upon yet in the class is parenting and this is a way to basically lock one layer to the next so that if you move one layer, it will also move another one. And because this shadow we want to lock to the dog, if we move the dog, I want to parent the shadow to the dog. So you have this parent column right here. If you don't see that, click the toggle switches modes button, that will be here to expand your timeline and you can do one of two things, you can either go to the drop down and select which layer you want it to parent too. So I would select dog. So now if I se take this dog and I want to scale it up, it also scales up the shadow. Another thing you can do in the easier way to parent an object to another one is to take what's called the pick whip which is this sort of twirly gig thing for the shadow and then drag it to the layer that we wanted to parent too. So again I'll drag it to dog which changes the column, it's just an easier way. So again if we move the dog layer the shadow layer will change as well because later on maybe we were like oh it's a little bit too big so let's make it smaller. Let me just bring in this clip. So we're just working in the first eight seconds or so or even like the first five or six seconds and then go to composition trim comp to work area and now if we play through this which because we're doing green screen we're adding a lot of mass, we're doing a lot of effects, it will slow down your playback. So remember what we learned earlier if you want to speed it up, change the resolution to like half or a quarter if you really want and you can see that it gets pixelated but it plays back more smoothly and more quickly. So now we have our green screen footage, we have the background, let's add a couple of those details to make it look even better because right now to be honest just this dog sitting on this image it looks a little fake so we're going to do as much as possible to make it look like a natural environment and that's coming up in the next lesson.

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Philip Ebiner

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Adding a Background that Matches the Foreground

Adding a Background that Matches the Foreground

Lesson Info

48. Adding a Background that Matches the Foreground

Lessons

Class Updates & My Favorite CC 2020 Updates

Understand the After Effects Workspace

Starting a New Composition

CC 2018 Update - Starting a New Composition from Footage

Adding Media to Your Project and the Timeline

Using the Basic After Effects Tools

Create a Perfect Circle, Alignment, and Shape Colors

Working in the Timeline

Layer Properties

Quiz: After Effects Basics

Animating in After Effects

Position, Scale, and Rotation Animations

Tips to Make Your Animations Look More Nautral

Using the Graph Editor

Challenge - Bouncing Ball

Solution - Bouncing Ball

Quiz: Animating with Keyframes

Working with Solid Layers and the Ken Burns Effects

Working with Shape Layers, Strokes, and Paths

Adding Layer Styles like Drop Shadow, Bevel, and Gradients

Shape Effects - Trim Path Animations, Wiggle, and Zig Zag

Quiz: Shapes and Solid Layers

Track Matte Animations - Make Layers Appear and Disappear

Using Pre-Compositions to Group Layers

Easily Reverse Complicated Animations

Playing with Time

Blend Modes

Stabilize Shaky Footage

CC 2018 Update - Previewing and Favoriting Fonts

CC 2019 Update - Responsive Design Time

CC 2019 Content Aware Fill

CC 2019 Create Motion Graphic Templates

Quiz: Important After Effects Skills

Intro to Motion Graphics Projects

Clean Lower Third

Logo Reveal Animation Bumper

Colorful Transition

Text with Mask Path Animation

Text Bubble Animation

Weather App 1

Weather App 2

Weather App 3

Quiz: Motion Graphics Projects

Flat Animation Challenge

Phil Designs his Flat Animation Scene

Animating Fireworks with the Repeater Effect

Removing Green Screen Background

Adding a Background that Matches the Foreground

Adding Motion to a Still Image with the Puppet Tool

Adding Movement with the Ripple Effect

Quiz: Flat Animation Challenge

Intro to 3D

Swinging 3D Text Animation

Build Out Your 3D Composition

Animating Our 3D Scene

Create Stars in After Effects

Quiz: Green Screen (Chromakeying)

Using the Rotoscope Tool

Cleaning Up Your Edges

Finishing Our Rotobrush Animation

Quiz: 3D Animations and the Camera Tool

Easy Screen Replacement with Masks

Replacing a Screen Version 2

Screen Replacement with Mocha

CC 2019 Update - Native Mocha AE Plugin

Quiz: Rotoscoping

Using the Puppet Pin Tool

Animating Your Puppet Pins

Animated Blinking Eyes

Adding Perspective with Animated Clouds

CC 2018 Update - Advanced Puppet Pin Tool

Quiz: Screen Replacements

Applying Text Animation Presets

Create a Page Turn Effect with CC Page Turn