ENDA Episode 132→ The time when ENDA expands a Star Wars set (Part 3)
The matte didn’t spring from a single prompt; it took multiple iterations. The first versions came with smoke that did not match the background. The reason? Residual smoke pixels on the keying made the AI go haywire.
At the end of Part 2, I said the set extension looked promising, and it does. But the “wow” came with plenty of work behind it.
Believe it or not, both foreground and background were AI-generated with the help of Midjourney and Photoshop. I can already hear: “ENDA, that’s cheating. AI did all the work.” Not quite…
The matte didn’t spring from a single prompt; it took multiple iterations. The first versions came with smoke that did not match the background. The reason? Residual smoke pixels on the keying made the AI go haywire. So it required a more refined and cleaner key on the plate, not to mention a special clean frame created only for the Matte generation.
Pro tip: if your key leaves residue, the AI will happily hallucinate around those pixels, and cleaning that later is a nightmare.
After the AI pass, the real craft kicked in with Photoshop: splitting foreground and background into separate plates, painting the in-between to remove repeats from the original plate, and having safe margins for tracking and the 3D breakdown. That breathing room matters when parallax starts to bite.
Did it save time overall? Honestly, maybe 10–20%. Still a win, and next time I’ll skip a few detours thanks to what this shot taught me.
Is this our final matte? Not yet. We still need full integration: color balance, matching defocus, and edge treatment, before it’s indistinguishable from the plate.
But that’s for another episode….
The journey continues…
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