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

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Extracting the mountains

Extracting the mountains

Now it's time to deal with the background mountains. We need to extract the mountains, for two reasons. First, we're going to handle them in a different manner than the other elements in the matte painting. Second, we're going to add moving clouds later on in After Affects, so the clouds need to be separated from the mountains. Let's start by looking to our alpha channels and see which channel has the most contrast between the mountains and the sky. The red channel has the most contrast, but this is going to have to be a two-step process. On the left side the mountains are nicely silhouetted against the white sky, but on the right side, you can see that the mountains are light against a darker sky. So we need to make two copies of this channel to apply different curves to isolate different sections of the mountains. I'm going to select the first copy of the red channel, then press Command+M on the Mac and Ctrl+M on Windows to open up the Curves dialog. Now I'll click into the white…

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