How to remove a cast shadow without cutting into the person
Ask Vizard Agent to remove the cast shadow and to leave the subject untouched. The two are joined: the shadow starts at their feet and moves exactly as they do, so the job begins with a mask of the person accurate enough that the shadow can be treated as everything else.
What do you type into Vizard Agent?
Say "behind" and say "only" in the same sentence. A bare request to remove the shadow reads to any general tool as a lighting correction, and a lighting correction lifts the subject's own shading along with the shadow on the wall behind them. Ask Vizard Agent to show you the mask before the whole clip is rendered.
Prompt
What does Vizard Agent actually do?
The shadow moves whenever the subject moves, so it can't simply be patched over, and it touches them at the edges, so a careless mask takes a piece of their outline. Separating the person from the shadow is most of the work, and it gets attempted three different ways before one holds. In the session behind this article it:
- Located the shadow behind a speaker on a contact sheet, checked the audio and inspected frames of the subject and shadow together to judge whether removal was possible.
- Looked at the opening for a clean area of wall to rebuild from, and at the ending to see how the subject and the shadow move.
- Tested a subject mask, then built a contrast-based mask and checked whether it kept the subject without the shadow. A contrast mask treats a dark, adjacent shadow as part of the person.
- Looked for a person-segmentation model that holds the hair and shoulder edges, exactly where a contrast mask breaks, and prepared a temporary version so the edit runs without dropping frames.
- Generated a shadow-removal test with everything else untouched, reviewed the shadow and the face, then repeated it with a more precise instruction about the projected silhouette.
When does this not work well?
Some shadows can't be separated at all. A soft shadow that merges into the subject, one thrown across a textured or patterned wall, or one falling partly on the person makes a clean removal impossible however carefully Vizard Agent masks it. Several overlapping shadows each need their own treatment, and fast movement makes the mask lag and the shadow flicker.
Common questions
What if the shadow falls on the person? That is their own lighting, and Vizard Agent will say it can't be removed cleanly.
Can I see the mask? Yes. Ask Vizard Agent for the mask view before it renders anything.
Will the audio change? No. Vizard Agent treats this as a picture-only correction.