Masking and Rotoscoping > Refining the Mask >

# Applying Softness Using Pickers

You can change the default mode of the Tracer from advanced gradient to pickers, allowing you to sample colours inside and outside the garbage mask spline, to apply softness according to the colour transition in the clip. Individual vertices can be set to either of these modes.

When great control over the mask edge is needed, for example, for fine edge detail, use pickers to effectively key out the background. The Tracer uses pairs of pickers to do luma and chroma analysis of the area inside and outside of the mask and derives localized edge keys from this information.

(a) Pickers—Colour analysis is done in the area inside the pickers.

The area that each picker affects extends halfway towards the two adjacent mask vertices, and up to the two softness borders, as shown in the following example.

(a) Borders of area of pickers' influence.

Using pickers, you can key objects that otherwise would be extremely difficult to key. Imagine a golden horse with a very fine mane on an unfocused background of various colours. As long as you have some chroma/luma differences in the background (green vegetation, blue sky, black earth or rocks), you can 'force' the outside pickers to sample these colour values. The inside pickers can sample the golden average values, and the Tracer can generate a soft-edged matte based on the difference between the two sets of values.

Pickers can be selected and manipulated independently of the vertices they are associated with. See Selecting Pickers and Softness Vertices.