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Tutorial 3: Keying and Mattes

This tutorial introduces you to keying in Nuke. You will learn how to use the Primatte, IBK, and Keyer nodes.

Introduction

Keying is one of those fundamental compositing skills. You can’t composite anything until you have mattes pulled for the elements you want to layer together. It’s nice to say you could just push a button to complete this task, but as you probably know, one keying operation seldom produces an acceptable matte. Image quality, lighting conditions, subject motion, colors - even camera moves - affect the steps required to get a clean matte for your composite.

Keying Footage in Nuke.

So how do you get a clean matte in Nuke? The best approach is to understand the strengths of each keying tool and combine them as needed. This tutorial shows how to pull keys in Nuke and how to layer the results with channel operations, merge nodes, and roto shapes.

Open the Tutorial Project File