Matte Painting

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About Matte Painting

Rules: Definitions of matte paintings below. Just in case your not sure your image is a matte painting.

Matte Painting is used in photography, painting, and special effects filmmaking to combine two or more image elements into a single, final image. Usually, mattes are used to combine a foreground image (such as actors on a set, or a spaceship) with a background image (a scenic vista, a field of stars and planets).

In film, the principle of a matte requires masking certain areas of the film emulsion to selectively control which areas are exposed. However, many complex special-effects scenes have included dozens of discrete image elements, requiring very complex use of mattes.

For an example of a simple matte, we may wish to depict a group of actors in front of a store, with a massive city visible above the store's roof. We would have two images-- the actors on the set, and the image of the city-- to combine onto a third. This would require two masks/mattes. One would mask everything above the store's roof, and the other would mask everything below it. By using these masks/mattes when copying these images onto the third, we can combine the images without creating ghostly double-exposures. In film, this is an example of a static matte, where the shape of the mask does not change from frame to frame.

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