How To Retain Green Screen Shadows and Fine Details | After Effects Tutorial

In this After Effects tutorial, we learn how to preserve dark-colored details like shadows and thin hair strands on a green screen! We will also cover how to properly composite shadows into your plate.

How to Key Out Bright Hair Detail:

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00:00 Intro
00:30 Separating Your Chroma Keys: Main Key vs. Detail Key
01:40 What is Shadow?
02:10 Creating the Shadow Key
03:28 Compositing The Shadow
05:28 Keying Hair Detail
05:51 Applying the same method to key out dark hair
07:20 Compositing the hair key

Hair Green Screen Plate:

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ActionVFX Socials:

[CsokaErno]

My friend, you are the greatest in the ocean of the internet.

[AllThingsFilm]

Brilliant. This is the tutorial I've been looking for for many years. Thanks.

[HitfilmSensei]

What a fantastic tutorial. Thanks Danasa!

[aybee]

This shadow trick is one of the most useful keying workflow I`ve seen. Thanks for that.

[MisterSable]

WOW!! That solves SOOOO many problems! Thanks!

[FilmLearnin]

Awesome work - now to grow some hair to test... let me get back to you on that one

[RolandJVyens]

Now I know it's that easy to key out the shadow. Thank you a lot

[Postamazers]

Thanks for sharing this, In my opinion you are a brilliant artist and have got good sense of composite work. It helped me a lot in a project to achieving the real shadow of the character.

[manecolooper]

Uber genius, thanks so much!!!, subscribed!

[WaseemOnlines]

That's useful tutorial. Thank you

[JaroAtry]

Nice tutorial. I do this by adding a shift channels effect to the shadow layer and setting alpha to luminance and R, G and B to Full off.

[JonathanCallarman]

Wow! That is amazing! Thanks so much for showing us how to do that!

[gijung]

Oh my.. Thank you for the make tutorial

[littlestudiorecords]

Hi mate is there a way to keep the shadows using the same technique with a moving image?

[joelscharen]

Is there a way to download the Warrior with the Axe?

[nils]

5:06 Wouldn’t you typically precomp the elements instead of parenting them?

[SitinprettyProductions]

Cool! How do you do that hair trick in Nuke? And the brown doesn't seem to be effecting the outline of her face (when she moves her face) how did you do that?