One of the marquee new features in Resolve 17’s Color Page update is the new Magic Mask palette. Available only in the for-fee Studio edition (because it uses Resolve’s Neural Engine), the Magic Mask can greatly speed up selecting people or parts of people, including specific clothing, that would normally require detailed animated power windows (really, rotoscoping) in order to create a clean selection for a secondary grade.

And while the Magic Mask can be used in isolation – especially when creating a nice tight garbage matte for keying – when combined with the Qualifier palette, you can make certain skin and clothing selections that would be otherwise extremely difficult to produce. For example, if the background matches the skin tone, or if the clothing contains a variety of hues.

In this week’s MacBreak Studio, I demonstrate how you can combine the Magic Mask with a qualification to make these kind of selections. The Magic Mask is good at isolating a person, or parts of a person, from the background, but it includes all features, such as eyes and hair. A qualifier is good for isolating skin tones, but can also pick background elements that can’t always be eliminated with a tracked power window if those elements intersect with the person’s skin. But if you apply both the Magic Mask and the qualifier in the same node, you get the intersection of these two selections, which eliminates all background elements and all non-skin facial features.

The same approach can be used to select specific clothing like a top, pants, shoes, or a hat. While the Magic Mask takes some real processing power to crunch through its analysis – especially when you need multiple strokes or tweak the settings – the end result is worth the time. Check it all out above. If you are interested in our brand new, fully updated, and Blackmagic Certified Advanced Color Grading tutorial for Resolve 17, you can check that out here.