Diamond Keyer/Select & Color Holdout

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1

I’ve been been slowed down by this a few times now. Wondering if anyone has any good tricks:

I’m grading some product shots (TimelineFX / Image node). The usual combination of keys/masks/curves, etc.

I do find the diamond keyer frustrating at times. And the fact that there’s no good way of key mixing.

Screenshot 2023-12-04 at 11.29.31 AM

Following scenario - product cap, a bit too dark and slight hue. So I need to select it and do some minor moves on it. Not hard - basic key and a lose mask for safety.

But this lavender passes in front of it. A single diamond keyer cannot capture the cap and hold-out the lavender. I tried various times to adjust the tolerance and softness ranges in the diamond to just zero in on the low-sat areas. Not enough control.

The other way would be to have a loser key for the cap, and then a second key for the lavender buds and subtract that. But I can’t see how to do that in the image node. Another option would be an HSL keyer, where you can hold out specific hues. But not available in the Image node.

Rotoing out the moving lavender buds would work, takes a lot of time.

I am using both selectives in Comp/Original mode, so they don’t influence each other.

I guess one option is to translate the whole pipeline into a BFX, do everything else in the Image node, and then pull just that correction out into BFX itself where I have access to the other keyers…

Any trick I’m missing?

PS: I tried tracer and salient keyer, they didn’t work good enough.

2

I think your best option is to migrate to BFX as you’ve mentioned.

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3

I agree. Was just holding out hope that there was a trick… I did submit having keying alternatives to the reverse user group exactly for cases like this.

4

So that works, but comes with major drawbacks. You lose the ability to drag selectives into the TL-FX explorer and you loose all the Tangent panel mapping for the Mastergrade, both of which are major productivity losses.

So I’ll have to find a compromise using just a BFX for those fixes pre-image node, and leave the rest as TLFX. Except now the order of operations is whacky…

Actually what might work (although more complicated than it should be):

  1. Do the normal grade on as TL-FX Image node on track 1, but skip this correction.
  2. Put as adjustment layer on track 2, that is a BFX with image node inside BFX.
  3. To simulate the ‘comp/origina’ selective, have that BFX actually just read the source file, and then comp this on top.