Hi all

I have a bunch of interviews which were shot against a black drape with a blue tint. Sadly the camera we used was not good enough to defocus the background so it doesn't look as good as I had hoped.

Can I use AEX to defocus those areas of the picture which have a blue tint? I tried it by duplicating the layer, applying a lens blur effect to the bottom layer, and then chroma keying the top layer over it, using blue as the key, but as you might expect the subject's edges don't key very well.

Any other suggestions?

thks

Apply a color correction effect and using the vector (circle) display, on the first circle on the left, move slightly towards yellow.

I don't think he's trying to remove the blue tint.  He wants to blur the background only.  Unless the subject was shot on solid background (green screen) it's difficult to pull a clean key with clean edges.  It's hard to say what you're up against without seeing an image from the shoot.

Sorry to drag this up again - here is the image (or should be - the url is www.ecs1.co.uk/jwtesPICt.jpg) .

I am trying to achieve a defocusing of the blue area behind the subject.

Any thoughts?

You can use the animatte effect to cut the person out of the background, which can then be placed on V2, and a blur effect applied to the entire frame on V1. OR, you could try either the chroma key or spectramatte key to replace the background entirely.

You can also use the paint effect so you only have one layer. Lasso out the whole background, adjust the feather settings and change the mode to blur.

Using the BCC CORRECT SELECTED filter will do exactly the job you want.

Apply the filter, select the blue, and use the blur amount slider.

(You may need to mask off the blue necklace)

Juris

All excellent suggestions.

At the risk of being patronising a thought on the camera. 

To get a narrow depth of field effect you need plenty of distance between the background, subject and camera. With the camera well back and zoomed in you should be able to get a defocused background with most cameras in my experience. But of course I don't know your situation.

Best of luck.

Yes we had a very shallow hotel room as our recording venue and we were shooting on a Z1. In an ideal world we would have a nice deep studio and a camera with a proper lens but on our budgets that's not possible unfortunately.

Thanks Juris, this worked perfectly.