What is color spill?

After you have created a mask in Primatte, you may see a colored tinge around the foreground image. This fringe is called 'color spill'.

Color spill describes areas of your foreground subject that have absorbed or reflected color from the background. This often happens during the shooting process and needs to be corrected afterwards. Spill is especially noticable (and difficult to remove!) in semi-transparent areas like blonde hair.

This fringe is also called 'green spill' or 'blue spill', depending upon the color screen you've used. Any color tinge will be especially noticeable in semi-transparent areas, like wispy hair and materials such as glass and water. You need to remove spill in order to create a natural looking composite. Otherwise, your composite will look 'cutout' and fake.

During the removal process, you want to be conscious of any tradeoff between removing spill versus maintaining color fidelity. Primatte gives you a dozen ways to remove this spill without losing details that you need to keep. [more]

Above, a tinge of blue is noticable in the model's hair. Primatte's simple masking process immediately removed the blue background screen. Now we need to deal with the color spill that is left over.

Here we've used two of Primatte's spill removal tools. The Spill Minus tool brought down the blue tones in the model's hair. Then the 'Restore Detail' brought back lost, delicate hair strands.