Static Masking in Premiere Pro Sky Replacement

It's a beautiful day, the beach, the sand, beautiful sky, but hang on, wait a minute, that sky is not real. In this video I'm going to show you how to add a Static Mask. We're going to do a bit of sky replacement, we'll also do this, where we cut a hole in this screen here, put another video behind it to kind of fake and mock up this video. It's all very exciting, simple Static Masks in Premiere Pro. 

So I've got a new project, just to separate it out, masking on its own. Let's bring in a couple of files. So I want you to bring in 'Masking01' and '02' to start with, and let's have a look at these. So one is a jpeg and one is video, you saw it at the beginning. So this is a Static Mask, it's not going to be moving, so it can be quite simple, let's make a sequence from the 01, 'Masking 01'. 

So we want to change the sky, make it better, change it, so we need to do our mask. With our clip selected we open up our 'Effect Controls', and here's our opacity, this is how you do a mask. You can use the Ellipse, the Rectangle tool or the Pen tool, it's up to you. In this case we might just start with the Rectangle tool, and it kind of gets us close. What we want to do is select out the sky so I kind of go up here, and then start dragging the edges. Now dragging the edges of this, it doesn't remain square at all. So you can kind of click this first bottom left one, hold 'Shift', when I say bottom one, these anchor points in the corners, keep holding 'Shift', click the second one, and at least they'll come down together. 

If you hold Shift while you're dragging, at least they'll come down straight. That's assuming my horizon line here is straight, but anyway, sometimes it's nice to keep the rectangle straight. So select the top one, hold 'Shift', click the next one, they always like to move, hold 'Shift', drag it along, and I've kind of got it there. 

Now the problem is, I've got the wrong bit selected, there's a hole here in the ground but not in the sky. So I'm going to invert my selection. Over here under ‘Mask 01’, click 'Inverted', and now what I want to do is grab my jpeg, which is 'Masking 02', put it underneath this, which is not going to work, this one, come up one, jpeg underneath, and it will fill the hole. It needs to line up perfectly, and be long enough for this whole clip, but let's select on the jpeg which is underneath, and we need to work on the horizon line, but let's actually get this in the right position, and you'll find double clicking on the screen is painful, just, it always is in Premiere Pro. 

Remember, you can lock this top layer, just lock it, and it means, when I double click it, I'm actually selecting the layer underneath, that's a handy way. So I can click it, double click it and just drag it up, until I get the right horizon. Obviously, I can't have, trees in the horizon line. So I'm going to line it up, something like that. 

All right, how do I feel about that? Yeah, it's okay, let's look at tidying it up a little bit. So I'm going to unlock this top layer, and I need to play around with this mask. So to click back on the mask, click on 'Mask 01', that gets it selected. We might blur it a bit more. So the opacity by default is at 10, you can crank it right up to be very blurry. I'm just going to zoom in a bit. Now there's no zoom shortcut, I remember, we've made one earlier in the class, I'm using '+' on my number keypad. You can just click it over here, and just keep going through these, until you get closer, use the edges. 

How do I feel about that, is it better? Click off, it seems to be an okay transition, okay-ish. It needs to come down a bit, doesn't it, and probably be a bit sharper, so this one here, I'm not liking the Mask Feather, so I'm going to make it down. I'm just going to lower my mask. Now I could grab the points and try and expand it, and just drag it down. You can play around with the Mask Expansion as well. Can you see, bigger, smaller. You might get away with that, that's what I'm hoping to get away with. Yeah, it's looking all right. 

I use that even though I set up my shortcut, which in my case is the 0 key on my number keypad. Is it good? We're probably going to need some sort of movement in the background, and you can use any of the tricks, well, any tricks to try and make them a bit closer to each other. So in this case I might-- it's a bit rich, so I might desaturate it. Let's do a couple of other things, and then we'll move on to the other example. 

So Essential Graphics, nope, I don't want Essential Graphics, I want Lumetri, 'Lumetri Color', it's just too blue. So I'm going to desaturate a little bit. Working on the wrong part. So I'm going to click on this part, desaturate a little bit, how far? There we go, seems nice. Let's blur it a little bit as well, so in my Effects, we're going to use Gaussian Blur, I can't spell Gaussian, gau, crazy word. I'm going to put that on the clouds. You might find actual clouds, that are a video, and they might be moving naturally as well. I've just used the jpeg, so pixel by image, Gaussian Blur, it's off by default, where are you, Gaussian? Lumetri Color, Gaussian Blur, crank it all the way up, down a bit, just until it feels natural. 

I don't know, how we're feeling? I feel like they're moving without having to animate them. You could play around with scale now, just a tiny bit, but I want to get on to the other example, let's do that now. So this other example is in your Fixing folder, it's called Masking 03 and 04. Now I put this in here because when I was mocking this kind of course up, I was like, "Oh, that's a good example," removing the sky, replacing it, and I was like, "That's kind of a very specialist thing to do." So I'll show you another instance of a Static Mask, so that we can practice, and show that it's not just for replacing skies. 

So in this one here what I want to do is, I've got a course that I'm trying to promote, this is my, like a little cross sell to you, "Go do my Photoshop course," I want to, like mock it up, like I do this, for like mocking up websites, or courses, in this case, I've got this kind of static jpeg, and I want to put it in the screen. So let's create a sequence from masking, for the video. Let's put the screen, which is Masking 03 on top of it. I can stretch it out for the whole entire length, because it's a jpeg, it just keeps on repeating, and what I want to do is I want to cut a hole in it. 

So let's cut a hole in the jpeg, which is at the top, 'Masking 03', let's go to our 'Effect Controls', let's use the 'Rectangle', I want to invert it, to cut a hole in it, and I'm going to click in the middle, move it around, get kind of close. Remember, clicking once, holding 'Shift', clicking the second one, holding 'Shift' while dragging, bit of a strange one. It's not even straight, so I can't drag straight down, but let's get close, and let's go to 200%. I'm going to get it close enough, I'm going to get rid of the feather, in this case, and I'm just going to click off, grab just that one. If you ever lose your mask, just click on the word 'Mask 01', again. I'm going to get it nicely, centers here, in the centers, and the corners even. Let's close it up. 

All right, I'm going to go back to 'Fit', and at the moment the video in the background is playing through, "and easy, you'll learn how to…" that I missed there, but it's too small, so wow, it's too big for the background. If I turn the top one off, you can see it's still full screen, this thing. So I need to scale it down, to what size? I'm going to click on 'Masking 01', drag the scale down, kind of something like that. Turn the eyeball back on my little computer screen, and kind of get it--

I'm going to play with the Scale, something there, play with the position, kind of get it close. It's good enough for my one, let's have a look. - "beautiful and easy, you'll learn how to…" That mask is-- edge there is annoying me. "how to easily enhance images…" You see, how like a mock-up for a website or a cell phone, doing an app. You might do a mock-up kind of video, through Adobe XD or something else, and then cut a hole in something static, like this, to mock it up, to make it look, feel more real. 

I'm going to fix that before we move on. Yeah, nothing else to see here, click on that, click on the Mask, zoom in, there it is there. Just be a little bit more good with it, there we go. Nice. "Photoshop Essentials, go, do it." All right, that's it, let's get on to another video, where the mask starts moving, be do our mask,cause this Static Mask stuff is way too easy for you, I know.