after going through your entire video clip that you want to make a selection for and then going back to the composition window, you might see that you know some of the edges are a little imperfect, it's a little jagged so we can use our roto brush matte options over here on the left to make some adjustments. It automatically has a couple of things that like the feathering and the contrast. But if I increase feather for example to 25 it gets rid of a lot of those jagged edges. Now we also get a little bit of parts of the image or the video that we might not want. Such as this little highlight in the back of his right ear so we can either go back into our layer by clicking the layer up here and making sure that we don't have this part selected. So again going back to the very beginning of the frame and pressing option and making that selection to erase it. And we could also decrease the size of our brush as well. The keyboard shortcut for changing the size of your brush on a mac is comma...

nd option clicking and then dragging to the right or left. So for a pc that should be control alt clicking and then dragging to the right or left. So I might have to go really small and then getting in there and making sure it's deleted. So again I would have to go through all these frames, make sure it's perfect. So that's one thing with the feathering. Another thing we can do. So let's put our feathering back up to 25. Another thing we can do is increase or decrease the shift edge. So by increasing we're expanding the selection by decreasing were decreasing in a bit. So we want to make sure it's not too far because then you start to cut off his ears and parts of his body that he don't want necessarily to cut off. So that's one other tool we can do reduced chatter is another thing. So if you play through this video or if you're using another video and you get some sort of distortion around the edges, Even through this one side can clip we get this little chattering around the edges a little motion and we want to reduce that. So what I'll typically do is just test out a few different numbers. Go up 25%. See how that works. If it helps then maybe I'll increase it and then play around with it until you see what works best. We also skipped over contrast. So this looks at the contrast of the edge compared to what it's next to. So for example A lower contrast creates a more blurred edge feather look because it doesn't isn't making a selection based off of a hard edge as much as something like 100% is. So 100% will really make edges nice and sharp but sometimes that doesn't look as good compared to something like lower but of course it depends on what you're working with. It also will depend on what your background is. So let me just turn down our rotoscoping. If I duplicate this layer by pressing command D and then you take the background layer, delete the roto brush tool and then say we want to just quickly make the background black and white with the foreground in color. I'll take my hue saturation effect in my effects and presets panel, drop it onto the background rotoscoping layer and then drop my saturation. Now this doesn't look too bad, this looks really good and that's because the background is the same as what the actual background is. What if I add sort of a color background. So let's make a red background, something like this with a new solid. That was just command why to bring up your new solid and put it behind here. Now the edge looks a little funny. So depending on what you're doing, you might play with these things. So for example I might shift the contrast up to 80, might decrease the feathering to depending on what looks best with my background. Another quick option to look at is this invert foreground background. So if you want to make a selection actually and actually delete what's on the inside, you can do that. Remember those old apple commercials for I think it was the ipod where the people were. You know, just a silhouette. This is a quick way to make that color silhouette of a person. Just by inverting the foreground and background. Another way we can refine the edge of our selection is with the refine edge tool which is also underneath the roto brush tool. Select that. And this is great for the edge of people's faces and heads especially because you have their hair. And what I would do is just paint along the edge of this guy's hair and it does a better job at separating the small areas and you can see as I paint along that the white part is the hair, that is the selection and the dark part is the non selected part. And so I should actually start this from the beginning, always start from the beginning and do that. So go along like so and so it's making that selection of the hair a little bit more precise. So if we go back to our composition, you can see that his hair is selected a little bit better. And now we have these options in the roto brush and refined end edge affects control is to refine that, refine edge match. So you have smooth feather contrast, shift edge for those specific things. So if we want to add feathering just to that little selection, we can increase the contrast to try to make a better selection based off of the edges and the contrast and color from the hair to the background. And you can also reduce chatter for the hair and they have two options more detailed or smoother. This is going to be slower. It's gonna take a lot more RAM and memory power. But if you're having a really tricky instance and someone's hair, you know, you've got wispy hair blowing in the background and it's really having a hard time making that selection. You might want to choose that. We can even go in here and use the refine edge tool for the part of the ear right there to get rid of that little white spot. And so now going back to our composition, you see that that has been removed. So using both of these tools and these settings over here, you can really get a nice selection from your image now that we know how to make that selection. Let's put this to use. I'm going to show you how to make that next selection of the cup down here, which is a little bit trickier in the next lesson. Then I'm going to show you how I created that actual graphic right here with the color sort of blending on as this boy sips his delicious drink

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Practice Files

buy this class

$00

Buy Class

Sale Ends Soon!

starting under

$13/month*

Unlock this classplus 2000+ more >

79.7K Students

99% Recommend this Class

00 Student Work

0 Video lessons in HD
00h 00m of class content
Exclusive bonus content
Lifetime access, anywhere, anytime
Streaming access on desktop and mobile browsers
Download and offline access with class purchase
Offline sync with our iPhone & iPad apps
100% satisfaction guarantee

Philip Ebiner

Professional video & course creator, photographer & teacher to 1mil+ students; 10+ years experience with 1000+ videos.

2,000+ classes ranging from fundamentals to advanced techniques.

Cleaning Up Your Edges

Cleaning Up Your Edges

Lesson Info

59. Cleaning Up Your Edges

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