Retaining Shadows and Removing Noise

Use the hold shadow dropper (only available when screen correct and shadow are enabled) to scrub on the shadows that you’d like to preserve. These shadows may best be seen in the foreground image.

If unwanted shadows remain, then use the remove noise dropper to reduce or eliminate those shadows. If the area that you scrub does not reside under the overlay, then erasing adjusts the appropriate Cleanup controls to reduce anomalies in the screen area. This might result in losing some fine detail. Repeat using these two tools until the shadows you want are retained and any shadows or noise you don’t want to keep are removed.

The density, sharpness, and tint of the shadow may be altered by manually adjusting the controls in Shadow controls. To learn which controls were automatically set by Ultimatte, click the Shadow and/or Cleanup tab in the properties panel and note the position of the controls.

Adjusting Shadows controls

Check the shadow box on the Ultimatte tab and adjust the following controls:

• high - Decrease this to reduce or eliminate unwanted shadows (which must be lighter than those shadows that are to be retained). All preserved shadows are lighter.

• low - Increase this to restore the density of the darkest part of the shadows that are to be retained.

• density - Use this to change the density of the shadows that are retained to better match shadows in the background scene.

• blur - Use this to blur the shadows.

• tint - Use this to tint the shadows.

Adjusting Cleanup controls

The following controls are used to adjust the black and gray areas of the matte channel. This dramatically affects the nature of foreground objects' edges, the opacity of transparent objects, and the noise in the foreground image. Use these controls sparingly as they might result in the loss of foreground detail. Using Screen Correction for dealing with imperfections in the screen is a good alternative for using Cleanup.

• cleanup - Use this control to reduce imperfections or small amounts of noise in the backing. Note that adjusting this control too far results in a "cut and paste" look with a hard, unnatural edge. Background noise (as well as some foreground detail) is reduced. An alternative method for dealing with green screen imperfections is to use the Screen correct controls.

• shrink - Use this control to choke or reduce the size of the cleaned-up matte.

• blur - Use this control to soften the cleaned-up matte.

• recover - Use this control to set a threshold below which the Cleanup control does not have influence.