Chapter Six. Matte Creation and Manipulation

In the last chapter, we introduced the concept of a matte image and gave some examples to show what an important role these images play in the digital compositing process. But unlike most other images that you will be dealing with when compositing elements together, matte images are not scanned into the computer from some outside source. Rather, they are almost always generated within the computer, often as a part of the compositing process. There are many different methods used to generate mattes for compositing, just as there are many ways that a matte image can be used. As mentioned, 3D rendering software will almost always be set up to produce a corresponding matte channel for the image that is ...

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