Skill Up: Fusion-Photoshop Painting/Cleaning Workflow – Part 1

Compositing raster-based paint fixes from Photoshop within DaVinci Resolve Fusion

Fusion offers a vector-based paint node. It’s essential for tasks where your paint strokes change from frame to frame. For example, removing a wire that swings in front of a background requires an animated paint stroke that follows the swinging movement and then samples different background areas for each frame. Fusion’s vector-based paint node excels in that situation.

However, if the frame’s content stays mostly the same, a dedicated raster-based paint software like Photoshop or Affinity can be easier and faster. You could also try one of the new machine-learning tools (marketed as ‘AI’) – but as I show in this Insight, they often fail miserably. If you want to add this skill to your professional toolkit, you must know how to execute this raster-based workflow manually.

In this Insight

Part 1 of this tutorial discusses all the tasks required to remove a bottle (and its reflection) from the frame. To avoid static noise in our final shot, we perform noise removal and add the noise again after the paint. For the paint itself, we select and export one dedicated frame as an OpenEXR file with linear gamma. The final paint gets tracked on top of the denoised plate with the help of a point or planar tracker.

Terminology