Green screen photography is a useful image-processing technique for quickly and accurately separating a subject—usually a person—from the background and placing it against any other background.
This technique does not strictly require vivid green; other saturated colors such as blue, orange, or pink can also work. Vivid green is commonly used in studios because it is relatively rare in clothing. More common colors, such as shades of red, are more likely to cause errors during keying.
Keying
Keying is derived from the word chroma key, which is a more general term for using color to separate the subject from the background.
Its application is common in product photography, business photography and event photography and photo marketing.
With Adobe Photoshop (or a comparable photo editor), choose Color Range, select the background color, and adjust the tolerance. This makes it quick and straightforward to isolate images shot against a solid green or blue background.
Below is a brief explanation.
- Open the image with the green background, choose Color Range, and select the green background with the eyedropper. Adjust the tolerance until the subject is completely masked.
- Use the plus eyedropper to add background areas that were missed by the initial color selection, including lighter or darker areas caused by gradients or shadows.
- When you are satisfied with the mask, click OK and manually correct any areas that were selected or deselected by mistake.
- To use your selection in a different background, choose Select>Edit>Shrink and choose a value of 1 pixel. Then choose from the Select menu>Edit>Feather and choose the value of 0.5 pixel. In this way, the detached subject is placed a little more naturally in the new background.
There are also various applications on the market that are specialized to achieve such a result very quickly, but if you are not a professional, this method with color range offers ample opportunities to achieve results quickly and beautifully.
For the cleanest possible cutout, and when time permits, it is best to work manually with a combination of digital tools. This can produce an extraction quality that green screen techniques cannot match.
Green screen photography
What you mainly gain with green screen photography is speed, you can quickly make the subject free-standing without many additional actions.
In 1998, Funpix direct marketing became the first specialized company to introduce green screen photography to the Dutch public as a form of photo entertainment, using it commercially for photo promotions and corporate events. Chroma key had already been used in video, but it was entirely new to photo entertainment at the time.
Nowadays this is a well-known phenomenon and you can encounter it everywhere and it is even taught at various photography schools. This form of photo entertainment is especially suitable for parties, festivals, conferences and fairs because of its speed.
Greenless green screen
As computers have become more powerful, software can now automatically isolate subjects without a green screen and place them against any background. This happens during capture rather than afterward. For many applications, however, the classic green screen method still produces slightly cleaner results and works faster.
All images in this article are green screen image creations from Funpix.
