Here’s how you can create feathered masks in Blender’s compositor.
Go to the compositor and check the “use nodes” checkbox.
Bring in your image source as an input. In this example we will use a movie clip. Let’s connect it to the composite output and lets also add a viewer node.
Now you should see your footage when scrubbing the timeline.
Let’s zoom the viewer out a bit so that we can see the entire image. Our goal is to create a feathered mask to create a smoother edge for the smoke footage.
Now you can change one of the windows to be an image editor and switch that to mask mode.
Lets set it to display the viewer node output.
Click new to create a new mask.
Then you can control left click to draw your mask. Let’s close it by right clicking and choosing “toggle cyclic”
To see the mask in the compositor, let’s add a mask node and plug into the viewer. Then we can choose our mask from the dropdown.
You sometimes need to re-plug a node to refresh.
To add feather, you can hit alt + s for the selected mask points. But at the moment the feather is going in the wrong direction, so let’s reverse the mask by going to mask –> switch direction.
Now we can see the feather starting to show up.
Let’s finish the node setup by adding some color correction and a set alpha node, that will mask the movie clip based on the mask.
That’s it, now we can just render our result out.
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