Green Screens

before and after

I’ve been asked many times, especially since I work almost exclusively with green screens these days, how do I get rid of all the green tint and get a nice clean cut out with feathers, semi-transparent skirts, hair etc. The technique that I use, I learned from Ryker Beck’s great blog post about how to handle it with Photoshop and with Gimp. You can find her post here, it was very invaluable to me when I was in the learning process. I only do one slight modification when it comes to correcting colored areas that aren’t black or white. So go off and follow her tutorial and then come back to check out my change. I’ll wait. :)


Now that you understand the process, the change that I do is in Step 4 - Removing the green from blond hair. After I create a new layer with the blending mode set to “Color” above my avatar pic and painting in the color of the tutu that I want to replace the green tint with; I set the Avatar layer to be a clipping mask for the color layer by moving my mouse to the line between the two layers and alt-left click with my mouse. This lets you have a little bit more flexibility to see immediately how the color you selected blends with the original color and you can still adjust it with Hue and Saturation. Or add slightly lighter or darker tones for highlights and shadows. Once you’re happy with how it looks, go ahead and merge the color layer down to make your life easier and no more green tint! \o/

For those that don’t have the masking options that Photoshop CS offers you, such as Photoshop Elements (which I used for a year before breaking down and buying the full CS suite), I unfortunately have lost track of the blog post that gave a really good but complicated technique to make yourself a mask for cutout. If I ever find it again or if someone knows of that blog and lets me know what the url is and I’ll update this post.

Once you have a good cutout and background to use (i'm using one I took at Cetus from the previous post), you have all sorts of options of how to compose the picture, make the avatar larger or smaller, offset from the center of the background (try it, you might like it), group multiple avatar’s into a group and the list goes on and on. A good composition can bring a picture to life or just leave it flat, so I recommend reading a book about photography composition; it does translate very well to sl photography.