Exposure Control

Often during simple compositing operations, we find something that looks good on our monitor, but as soon as it's shown on film or certain television sets, the composite no longer holds together. Take this following example:

We have this nice background plate footage here:

And this garbage-masked green-screen footage ready to be keyed here:
So we pull the key with Keylight, and this is what we get:
Now obviously it's too bright and there is not enough contrast in the above image, so we add a grayscale adjustment layer, and play around with the keyed shot until we have something that we think looks good, like this:
Unfortunately, those shadows would pull apart from the background when displayed on many TV monitors, such as the one I have connected to my workstation. A great but little known tool for just this is called Exposure Control. As of CS3 you don't have to be in 32bpc in order to take advantage of it. It's located in the bottom right hand corner of the comp window, and is very useful in performing a slightly modified version of 'gamma slamming.' When we crank up the exposure, we can see that the shadows on his black shorts are much too bright compared to the black rails in the background, or even the shadows on the ground in the corner:

So now we can do some further adjustments, and notice that the shadows of the shorts match much more closely with the background than before, and they have a nice fade-off into the lighter shades, just as the darks on the floor do:The final composite (of just the shadows) can be seen here. Obviously we still have the highlights, shadows, midtones, and color to worry about...but that's a different post.