From the course: Digital Matte Painting: Changing a Scene From Summer to Winter

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Extracting the foothills

Extracting the foothills

I am going to use a different technique to deal with these background foothills: one on the right and one on the left. I need to separate the foothills from the background mountain, because I'm not going to handle the mountain the same way. Once again, I am going to look to my alpha channels and see which one has the most contrast between the foothills and the background mountain. The blue channel is the best choice because it offers the most contrast. Duplicate the blue channel and then apply a Curve to it. You'll want to make everything on the foreground foothills black and everything on the background mountains white. Pull the white point to the left till the mountains turn completely white. Then pull the black point to the right, until the foothills turn completely black. You won't be able to get it absolutely perfect, but it'll work fine with a little cleanup. Now zoom in on the alpha channel and with the Lasso tool, get rid of this little bit of bleed-through from the background…

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