Secondary Colour Grading > Creating a Secondary by Keying a Range of Colours >

# Using the Diamond Keyer to Extract a Key

The Diamond Keyer provides comprehensive controls to set the key colour, as well as the chrominance range and luminance levels for softness and tolerance on the hue cube. You can set these by using sliders and numeric fields, or by sampling colours in the image.

With the Diamond Keyer, you can extract a key based on a preset red, green, blue, cyan, magenta, or yellow colour, or on a sampled colour. You can also use previously-saved keyer presets. See Saving and Loading Presets Using the Presets Lists. By manipulating the chrominance Softness and Tolerance Diamonds, which define the boundaries of the chrominance range for softness and tolerance on the hue cube, you can quickly and easily isolate the colour for which you want to extract a key.

You can modify a key by adjusting the luminance levels using the Luminance gradient controls and by adjusting the chrominance range and luminance levels using the Add/Remove Softness and Tolerance buttons. You can further modify a key using the Sharpness, Cleanup, Shrink, and Blur parameters.

NoteTo disable the Diamond Keyer at any time, right-click on the Keyer option box.

Before extracting a key, you can modify the source image by using the Input Transform Log to Lin and Soften options. See Tools Settings.

Use the following workflow to extract a key for colour isolation.

Step: | Refer to:
--- | ---
1. Access the Diamond Keyer. | See Accessing the Diamond Keyer.
2. Select the colour that you want to key. | See Sampling a Colour in the Diamond Keyer.
3. View your secondary to determine the range of colour to key. | See Viewing Secondaries in the Diamond Keyer.
4. Set the luminance levels and chrominance range for tolerance to extract in the key. | See Setting the Tolerance Range in the Diamond Keyer.
5. Set the luminance levels and chrominance range for softness to extract in the key. | See Setting the Softness Range in the Diamond Keyer.
6. Blend the light and dark edges of a key by shrinking, eroding, or blurring the edges of a key. | See Modifying the Edges of the Key.
7. Remove stray pixels from a key to clean it up for colour grading. | See Removing Stray Pixels from a Key.
8. Increase or decrease the softness of pixels that are in the tolerance range. | See Sharpening a Key Source Image.

The following procedures are not essential for extracting a key. You can perform these procedures any time after extracting a key.

Step: | Refer to:
--- | ---
1. Remove colours that you do not want to include in the key. | See Inverting Keys.
2. Exclude a key that you do not want to appear in a secondary. | See Excluding Keys from Secondaries.

#### Topics in this section

- Accessing the Diamond Keyer
- Sampling a Colour in the Diamond Keyer
- Viewing Secondaries in the Diamond Keyer
- Setting the Tolerance Range in the Diamond Keyer
- Setting the Softness Range in the Diamond Keyer
- Using the Scale and Skew Controls in the Diamond Keyer