What It Does
Composite Brush lets you create complex selections by painting directly on your footage. Click and drag to select colors, Alt+click to exclude them. It replaces traditional keying and rotoscoping with a brush-based workflow that handles everything from hard-edged objects to transparent hair and smoke.
Key Features
Brush-based selection. Click to mark colors you want selected (positive), Alt+click for colors you want excluded (negative). The plugin calculates a matte based on your strokes, ignoring earlier effects in the chain so your key stays consistent even when color correcting.
Transfer modes. Apply different operations to selected areas. HSV copies hue from a chosen color and multiplies saturation/lightness by 2x. Hue, Saturation, and Luminance modes isolate those channels. Normal replaces selected pixels with a solid color. Increase Alpha boosts transparency within the selection. Stencil Alpha removes alpha inside the selection, Silhouette Alpha removes it outside. Restore RGB and Restore RGBA bring back original pixel values in selected regions.
Multiple matte types. Hard is fast, grabs large uniform color areas with sharp edges. Medium adds softer falloff for general opaque matting. Hair v1.3 specializes in semi-transparent elements (hair, smoke, glass, fire) with one positive selection and multiple negatives, producing very soft edges. For most work, try the Soft 1.6 mode, which handles hard, soft, and hair-type edges depending on the shot.
Matte refinement controls. Invert your matte, adjust precision to handle similar colors, clip high/low alpha values with levels, blur the selection, or use choke to expand/contract edges. An “Optimize and Soften” toggle improves performance and smooths over edges.
GPU-optimized. Processes quickly for interactive work, especially in Hard mode.
Who It’s For
VFX artists and compositors who need to isolate objects, pull keys, or modify specific color areas without switching to external roto tools. Useful for shots with fine details (hair, glass, semi-transparent elements) where standard keys struggle.
Pricing
$99.99 for a perpetual license. Trial available from the aescripts page.