Original subtitles

So I have this clip of my friend Ben and I

and let's say I wanted to isolate us from the background

so I can make specific adjustments to us in the background separately.

Well, what are some different ways that we can do this?

Well, maybe we can use the qualifier.

We can select our subject here, shift H to show us what our selection is

and try to kind of isolate our selection like this.

And we can see that this isn't really working that

well because we're picking up a lot of the same tones

in the background in these rocks in the driveway.

So it's not really an option unless we combine this with windows.

So with windows, we can isolate our region even more

so that we're not picking up much of the background as well.

But then I'm going to have to make a pretty specific window around me here.

We have to add a bunch of points and it's just going to

it's just going to take a long time.

That's not going to be the best way to do this.

And then, of course, we have to track it afterwards.

So this is why Magic Mask is so awesome.

So I'm going to reset this node.

Let's head over to the magic mask

and let me just demonstrate how amazing this is right off the bat.

So with this plus eyedropper selected right here, all I need to do

is draw a little line or a stroke on the subject that I'm trying to select.

And right after you do that, you'll see a red selection

of what is DaVinci thinks you're trying to select.

Now, if you're not seeing this red overlay,

that's because this button right here is not enabled.

So make sure that toggle mask

overlay is enabled so that you can see that red overlay.

Now we can see it didn't do an amazing job

because the mask kind of extends out past our actual subject here.

But that's because we have two different options here.

We have faster and we have better.

Now, the reason DaVinci gives us these two options

is because a lot of the time in the world of color grading,

you don't actually need that precise of a mask to make the adjustments

that you're trying to make, especially if they're very minimal,

like minor exposure changes and things like that.

So in a lot of situations, especially within color grading,

you can actually just stick with the faster setting.

But if you are looking to get a more accurate and specific mask,

then you'll want to switch over to better.

So watch what happens with the overlay when I switch to better.

Just like that, we have a much more refined mask.

Things are looking really good.

We can see that we're still cutting off a bit of the ear here and the hair

isn't perfect, but for the amount of time that we put into this,

it's done an amazing job and that looks really good.

Now notice how when I hover my mouse over top of this joke here,

it highlights it down here in the timeline of the Magic mask.

So this is very useful, especially in situations

where you're going to be using more than one stroke

so that you can identify what stroke it is that you have your mouse over top of.

And there are situations where you're going to want to use more than one stroke,

especially when you're just trying to define certain features of a subject.

You might be selecting multiple features like all the exposed skin on a person.

So maybe on their hands, maybe on their face, their legs, things like that.

So in situations like that, you will have multiple strokes.

So we basically use these strokes to define what is our subject.

And we can also use these other strokes,

these subtractive strokes over here if we select this tool here,

we can use a red line to define what is not a part of our subject.

So in certain situations, we might find that Da Vinci A.I.

thinks that a part of the background

is actually a part of your foreground, and the overlay extends past the subject.

So in those situations, will want to use this subtractive tool

to define what we don't want within our selection.

But in this case, it did a good job.

So we're not actually going to have to draw any of these subtractive lines.

But take note how down here

we can see each one of our strokes individually in our timeline right here.

And if we ever want to delete any of these,

we can just select it just like this and hit backspace on the keyboard.

Now, the mask that we've created isn't actually track to our subject yet.

If we scrub through

our timeline over here, we can see that we lose that overlay right away.

And if we look in our timeline down here in the Magic Mask panel,

we can see this little blue mark

and that just represents one frame that actually has mask track data.

So if we navigate back to that one frame right here, we can use the buttons up

above here to start tracking the mask that we just created.

So these are pretty much the same kind

of tracking buttons that we find in the tracker panel over here

starting to the left.

We have go to the first frame of the tracked area.

So if we have a range of this timeline that's already been tracked,

we can hit this to go to the first part of that tracked area.

Then we have track one frame backwards, track backwards, pause the track

track forwards and backwards, track forwards, track one frame forwards

and jump to the last frame of the tracked area.

Now, the reason we have these tools is because a lot of the time

when we are doing a track like this, things can start going out of control.

So in certain situations we will want to pause the track halfway

and this is the button that we going to want to use.

The spacebar doesn't actually work, so keep that in mind.

If you want to pause the track, hit this pause button right here.

If we want to track individual frames forwards and backwards,

we can use these buttons right here, in here

and in a lot of situations it can be useful to just track one frame at a time,

but in my experience, most of time I just do track forwards and backwards.

And if I do run into any hiccups, I'm able to select a certain range here

and delete it and modify it

and I'll be showing you guys how to do that in a second.

So I'm going to hit this

track forwards and backwards button and let's see how well it does.

So right

away we can see that it's starting to be unsure

of whether or not my bag should be part of the selection over here.

So it's going in and out of the selection.

Awesome.

So it did a pretty good job.

If I scrub through this, I'm pretty happy with that outcome.

I think it did a great job.

This is something that would normally take

a very long time to do, but this took probably about a minute.

So what can we do about my bag here?

I don't want it going in and out of the selection.

Well, what we could do to fix this is just to create another stroke.

So I'm going to make sure

that I have the adding stroke tool selected here, not the subtractive one.

And I'm just going to draw a line over top of my bag here as well.

And just like before, I'm going to track forwards and backwards

and then this should solve the problem.

It looks like it's doing a pretty good job there.

Awesome.

So that issue that we had before is no longer there.

We have a pretty solid mask around our subject here.

Now, one really cool option that we have up here in

the top right is invert our mask.

So if we click this, it's going to invert the mask.

We're going to select everything except the subject that we originally isolated.

This is a great option to have because in a lot of situations like this one,

it would be hard to try to make

a selection on everything else except our subject here.

It would be a lot easier to just select the subject, invert the mask,

and that way we can get a selection on everything else.

So this is just another way

for us to make very specific selections to any part of our image.

And the bottom right here, we have our Matt Finesse tools.

And if you're not seeing this, it's

because you haven't enabled this button here in the top, right?

So make sure that's enabled

and you'll be able to see all of these different options and essentially

these are all different parameters that we can change to refine our mask.

So for example, in a lot of situations, what I will do

if I'm just trying to make color grading changes to my selection,

what I'll do is increase the radius here under shrink.

I'm going to make sure that the mode is shrink and not grow that way.

It's going to shrink the mask.

So I'll shrink it a little bit like that

so we can see that the mask doesn't extend past our subject too much.

And then from there, I'll increase the blur radius.

So maybe make this like something like 15

so the edge isn't as sharp.

You can see it's kind of blurry there.

Maybe I'll bring this up to like 25 actually blur even more.

And now I'd be able to make very controlled adjustments

to just the subject so I can go in to my curves here,

start playing around with the exposure.

And because we don't have that

hard edge, you can't really tell that there is a mask.

So my computer is running pretty slow right now, and that's

because this is a very processor intensive task.

And that's why in a lot of situations, especially like this one, it's okay

to use the faster option, especially when you're just going to contract your mask

and then blur the edges to make adjustments like what I'm doing here.

That should do the trick.

And a lot of the time you're not going to need to use that better option.

I'm just going to reset this curve here and let's go back into the magic mask.

So these are

all different parameters that allow us to refine our mask.

So in a lot of situations, if the blur radius and the radius aren't

enough for you to get the desired result, play around with these different options,

experiment and see what looks best for your specific situation.

I'm just going to reset the radius here.

I'm going to bring it back down to zero.

Now, up here in the top right, we have smart refine.

And basically what this allows you to do is refine the edge of your mask.

But in a smart way.

Basically, this option is still utilizing Da Vinci's neural engine,

the same one that was used to actually make

the initial selection to determine what parts of our masks

should be contracted and expanded more than others.

Personally, up until now, I haven't

really gotten good results with this, but I'm sure it varies from situations.

The situation.

But if you wanted to refine your mask to contract it, make it smaller.

Basically where you're going to do is increase the value.

So let's bring this up to 80

click enter and we can see that the mask contracted

a little bit in certain areas more than others.

Now, in this case, why did it choose to contract more in this area then?

Maybe my hair, I'm not sure.

But, you know, in this case, that's not really helpful

because I want to make sure that I have a good selection around my neck here.

And the same goes for expanding the mask.

If we want to expand it, let's

bring this value below 50 so we can bring it to like 30.

You click enter and we can see that it's expanded the mask

in some areas more than others.

So let's reset this.

I could bring this back to 50 click enter.

I'm just going to scale out here.

So now that I have a pretty accurate selection

around my subject, I can start to get creative.

So maybe I can create a layer mixture node over here.

I can bring this mask to the top by switching these inputs over here.

Bring this one over here.

So now I have the isolated subject on top of the original clip here

and what I can do is make some changes to the background here.

So let's say I wanted the background to feel like crazy Sunset

make it a lot more colorful, but without affecting the subject in the foreground.

So I can do that over here.

Let's make it a lot pinker by increasing the tense.

That looks pretty good to me.

And we can see that we've done that without affecting me in the foreground.

So we've isolated me.

Now, of course, we can see that my hair, the selection here isn't the best.

We can see that there's still spots around here

that contain the original sky, but we can actually fix that pretty easily.

First thing I'm going to do is actually just increase the blur radius

on the original mask here in the Magic Mask window.

Probably bring this up to like 15

and that kind of just smooths out that edge.

So now what I can do is just duplicate this magic mask note over here

by hitting option L, and then I can just copy whatever's

on this first node command. See,

pasted on this last note over here,

Command V,

we have that same magic mask information on this last one.

And basically what I want to do is isolate just the hair region

within this magic mask over here.

So what I'll do is go to my Windows panel and I'll grab the gradient

down here at the bottom

shift H to show me my highlights.

It's going to zoom out

and basically what I want to do with this gradient window is isolate

just my head region over here, because that's the part that's in the sky.

So I'm going to bring this up.

That looks pretty good to me for now.

Shift H to hide the selection.

Now at this point, what I want to do with this, no,

down here at the bottom, which is actually on top of everything

else, is to change the colors of just the remaining sky.

So that's probably going to be like my midtown.

So I'll head over here to my primary log wheels.

I'll go over to mid tones.

I'm going to start playing around with the log wheel

here, trying to make it a bit more pink so that way it's not affecting

my hair, it's just affecting the brighter parts of that selection.

And that way it'll allow us to kind of blend in better into the background

so the mid tones aren't doing too much.

Let's try highlights.

Cool.

So by isolating the highlights within our log wheels

and making them more pink, we're able to kind of blend that original sky

into the new sky background and that gives us a much better result.

So I'm going to shift Z here. Now.

My computer is struggling right now because we have to nodes

both with the magic mask applied to them and that is definitely very processor

intensive, especially because I'm also screen recording this lesson as well.

So this is a great example

of how we can use the magic mask to isolate our subject from the background

and make individual changes to each element to get the exact look that

we're wanting.