I want to remove the background while keeping the effects it causes
I have an effect that works off of the background. I want to remove the background while keeping the effect in place. Any help would be great.
I have an effect that works off of the background. I want to remove the background while keeping the effect in place. Any help would be great.
Not really. Unless that raindrop refraction is created using a custom displacement map that would also include a matte, this is hopeless. You'd work your fingers off masking out each individual drop, even more so since the refractions continually change.
Mylenium
The easiest thing to do would be to make some contrast and color adjustments to the base image and turn it into a displacement map. This is the starting point:

I've shown you everything that I did to get to that point.
The next step is to duplicate the pre-comp used for the displacement map in the project panel, bring it into the main comp, make further adjustments and use it an overlay using the add or screen blend mode to bring back the highlights. Then you duplicate that copy and set it to Multiply. Add curves to both copies to bring in the highlights and shadows.

This will get you fairly close to the effect I think you want. If you want to bring back some of the color from the first background try throwing tint or fill into the original image or bring back the color. Bringing back the color in the overlay gives you this.

It took about as long to do the project as it did to write this post. I'm assuming that is something like what you want to do.
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