One of the most difficult tasks when working with a Green screen is working around hair. This task can be particularly tricky because the green screen is tangled or mixed within hair. After removing the green screen you might end up giving the subject a really bad haircut that does not look natural at all. Fear not! There is a way to work through this difficult challenge with a few tools and presets within Adobe After Effects. Now you may be wondering, why not use Premiere Pro for this? Great question! The Keylight tool in After Effects is superior to the Ultra key effect in Premiere Pro because the effect gives you more control and it includes other some effects to produce a more realistic key.

Today you can read all about removing green screen & spill within Adobe After Effects and we’ve included the video time-codes next to each step. Questions? Leave a comment below.

Creating The Mask (2:23)

So the first step is creating a mask around your subject. By creating a mask, you are isolating the part of the green screen that the person is in. Begin by going to the pen tool and clicking around your subject. If you want to make a curved line, you're just going to click & hold and It will make a curved line which you can adjust. Once you get all the way around, close it off and now you have your mask.

Tip: If you're dealing with a more complex shot, you may want to use another advanced tracking software called. Mocha, by BorisFX which is built into after effects. You can also use it Mocha Pro with Premiere Pro. You can get 15% off BorisFX products with my code: premieregal2020

Working With Keylight (3:27)

Next you will go to Effects and search for Key Light. You can apply the key light effect by itself but instead choose the preset which also includes the key cleaner and the advanced spill suppression. Drag and drop this on to the video clip and now from effect controls you can see that all three effects are applied.For now, just turn off the key cleaner and make sure that the advanced spill suppression is off as you will focus on the key light effect first. Use the dropper tool to select the key color and try to select a medium green color, one that's not too dark or not too bright, and choose it closer to the hair of our subject. As you zoom in and use the H key on your keyboard, ( the hand tool to move around), you can see that some refinement is needed around the edges of the subject.

Before you do the refinement, go up to view and change it to screen matte and you can see how the matte is doing. Here you can see some work needs to be done because there's lots of gray areas. But what do the Grays, Whites, and Blacks have to do with refinement? Great question! The gray just simply means that there's some slight transparency. You don't want any grey in the white areas of the foreground. You want the foreground to be completely white, which is opaque. In the background, you don't want any grey areas either, you just want it to be pure black, which is pure transparent. That's what the colors mean.

Clipping the White and Black (4:59)

To remove the Gray areas, you need to adjust the screen map controls first so that means you will clip the black. To do this, begin by opening up the clip black controls. You can use the slider and start to move it over to the right to clip the black until you see the Gray areas start to go away. Be careful because if you move it too much you can see that it starts to clip into the hair and you don't want it to trim the hair too much. As a general rule, you want to try to do the least amount of clipping of the black as possible.

Moving on to the clip white, you will roll the slider this time to the left and as you roll it you'll see a bit more detail come into the hair.

Tip: As you roll it back you might also need to clip the black more because rolling the white to the left can bring in more Gray into the background. Be sure to check your work by zooming out and moving down to make sure everything else is looking good in the shot as well as the body. If all is good then you can close the screen matte tools and you can change the view back to intermediary result.

The Key Cleaner (6:31)

Zoom into the edge of the hair and here you can see there's still a lot of green which is somewhat jagged and ugly. This is where the key cleaner comes in handy. When you turn on the key cleaner, immediately you can see that it gets more soft around the hair, so it's not so much of a harsh edge.

And now when you play it back, you can see that there's this awful chattering animation around the hair. This means that Keylight is confused. Keylight is confused because the hair is so soft that it's not sure what is transparent and what's not. But what's really cool about the key cleaner is you can turn off the chattering by checking the box “reduce chatter".” And now when you play back you can see almost all of that chattering is gone just by checking the box.

If you don't want as soft as an edge around the edges of the hair you can reduce the edge radius. If you lower it too much, you can see that the edges start to get a little bit too jagged as well. Also, be sure to look at the rest of your subject.. Use the hand tool to go around and see how the edges of the jacket are doing. You don't want the jacket to also have soft edges because the key cleaner also affects all edges of the body, so I recommend to lower the edge radius so that way the the edges are not too soft.

The Magic of Advanced Spill Suppressor (8:04)

If you find that you’re still seeing green in the hair, this is where you’re going to use the advanced spill suppressor which is super magical. Just turn on the advanced spill suppressor; that's it! The green just disappears automatically. It's pretty amazing because all the tool did was neutralize the green screen. If we turn off the key light effect, you can see that it turned the background into kind of a neutral gray background and that's how it got rid of the green spill in the hair. This is a key part of helping you refine your hair.

Compositing (10:25)

If you want to learn how to more realistically blend your keyed out subject with your new background please watch the tutorial at 10:25 to learn how to use the following effects:

Color Matcher - To match the colors of the foreground with the background
Light Wrap - To lightly wrap your subject in the lighting of the background
Camera Lens Blur - To add a natural camera blur to the background
Adjustment Layers with Lumetri Color - To give the entire composite a consistent look

Moving forward you are going to know how to key subjects out professionally and more often than not - you're going to use that keylight, key cleaner, and spill suppression preset which comes built inside of After Effects. What A HUGE time saver! As you know, in the creative industry, time is everything so it makes sense to invest time in learning methods and tricks to save you time!

Until next time, be well and keep creating better video with Gal!

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Remove Green Screen & Hair Spill with Adobe After Effects