User Manual

When selecting the new node and opening the Key palette, you can see that the Key Input’s
Invert control is on by default, which is what inverts the key from the previous node.
The Key Input Invert control is on by default for each node
If, instead of using the Outside node to invert the incoming key, you want to copy the existing
key in order to perform another operation to the same isolated region, you can disable the key
input’s Invert control.
Feeding Keys From One Node to Another
One of the most powerful aspects of the Node Editor is the ability to create keys based on a
specific part of the node tree, and feed the result into a completely different correction
somewhere else in the node tree. This is one of the reasons for the separate key input and
output on every Corrector node.
The key that’s created whenever you use the HSL Qualifier, create one or more windows, or
use an external matte can be output from one node’s key output and fed to the key input of any
other node in a tree. There are many reasons to do this, but the following example shows a
common problem you can solve with this technique.
Using a key from one node to make an adjustment with a different node:
1 Use Node 1 to apply a basic primary correction, increasing contrast and balancing the
color to achieve a pleasing ambient color temperature.
2 Add a Serial node (Node 2), followed by a Layer Mixer node which also adds Node 4
(as seen in the following screenshots). Then, completely desaturate Node 4 and add
contrast to make it super-high contrast black and white, desaturate Node 2 just a bit,
and right-click the Layer Mixer node to choose the Overlay blend mode with which to
combine these two layers.
A group of nodes to create a stylized image
The result is a highly stylized image, but the skin tone on the actor’s face and hands in the
resulting image are too monochromatic, and you want to give them some differentiation.
Simply adding another node after the Layer Mixer and keying the skin tone may not work
well because the low level of saturation will make a key difficult to pull.
Chapter – 126 Combining Keys and Using Mattes 2855