How to Make a Green Screen Background in Photoshop Video

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Photoshop Mama's Greenscreen-Example 2 on fire background

Hi! This is Mama Shan with another video tutorial in our Green Screen series. If you have been following along your image should be in this state where we change the background experimenting with some of the built-in preset patterns that Photoshop has to offer. In this section of the tutorial, we are going to further and I am going to show you another way to change the values of the skin tone to match the background other than the photo filter. The photo filter is not in all versions of Photoshop so I want to show you several other ways that you can remap that lighting effect on your subject. So this is where we left off and this is where we are going to. We are going to simulate a fire background in Photoshop. So let us get started. Just minimize this and so you can see this is where we left off. We have separated that layer style so have that particular skill under our belt to play with. Now what I am going to have you do is to actually delete these two clipping mask layers that we had applied to the color fill background. So we will just Shift click to highlight them both and you can just hold down your Alt key if you do not want the dialogue box or confirmation of the deletion to come up and drag them to the trash icon. And so now we have just got our extracted image on the color fill background. The first thing that we are going to do is change the color fill. I am going to double click on this and I am going to select an orange color. And for the fire effect, what we are doing is basically targeting an area that is between the red and yellow that way will get that sort of two tone fire color by doing that. And you can—if you want something other than a fire color, you can go in between and use this colors that imply a little bit of one color or another. Like this cyan would do it in violet would do it and the yellow green would do it so you get that two tone but for fire we want to target right in the orange area at—and we are going to start of with this high intensity in the upper right hand corner. Click OK. Now to this color fill we are going to add some effects. So click on the effects icon with that color fill layer highlighted, enter the effects and we are adding a pattern overlay, the layer style box opens up. And you want to click in the pattern window this little triangle here which opens up the choices the library for it. If you do not seek what we are looking for is clouds and if you do not see it, you can easily get to it by clicking the other fly out tab here and choosing reset patterns and then just click OK. And it is going to replace with the default patterns which if you look down here remove this up again, clouds is the last one in the default set. So highlight clouds and then you want to scale this all the way up to 1000. And we are going to reduce the opacity. We are going to play with this a little bit later but I am going to reduce the opacity inside here to 60 and leave at it normal blending mode. And while we still have the layer style box open, click on the name gradient overlay. So that it is highlighted and brings up the properties for that particular gradient. And we are going to change the blending mode of we are going to use a black to transparent gradient. And since we have—so we are going to choose foreground to transparent here and with your foreground color is anything other than black, you still select this but click on this first stop and change it to black. Double click and choose black and then over here, you want this to be black, but up here in the transparency stop which is right above it, you wanted to say opacity zero. So click OK on that, and then we are going to change the blend mode of this to color burn. Now, what we are trying to achieve is to have the lighter area at the bottom and the darker area at the top. So, if yours is already set like that that is fine otherwise just click reverse. And now we are starting to dial in this sort of fire reappearance. And you can reach right in to that image window. And change the position of that gradient by dragging and you can see that we are starting to get kind of a fiery appearance here. You can also play with the scale of the gradient which is will choke or expand it. And as far as the angle goes, you want to leave that at 90 degrees and that will work best for that. And if you change the opacity, you are going to dial in if you lower that opacity of color burn. You will see more of those clouds up of the top. So increasing the opacity in the color burn mode is going to choke out some of those top clouds, starting to look more like fire right now. Okay. Now you could leave this as is and then it will work for fire but we are going to repeat what we did in the last tutorial, separate this and add some filters to that pattern overlay layer to make it look even more like flames. You can also change the color. We dialed in an orange but I want to show you how this effect changes when you choose different colors. That is a little too dull. But if we come up here and say choose the cyan. You can see that two tone of the blue and the cyan appearing. Choosing just a regular primary is not going to give you that much jitter or difference on the effect but going into this in between colors secondary or tertiary colors, you are going to get that effect that you want. So we will just come back down here and I will dial in that orange color, like that and click OK. So what we want to do is create layers from this effects so that we can add filters to them. So we are going to right click on the effects icon that is directly on the layer to open up the fly out tab and choose to create layers option. And that is going to get us our clipping mask. They are clipped to both of these to this bottom layer that is underlined. And we are going to highlight the pattern fill layer which is clouds and we are going to start it off by adding a little of motion blur to it. So I am going to filter blur, motion blur and just dial this into taste and the angle should be again a negative 90 or 90 degree. So it is going straight up and down. If I decrease the distance it is not doing much and you do not want to go too far at least you like that effect but we are trying to give it a simulation of being like flames. So I am just going to add maybe 150 on this and you can experiment with some other filter as well to distort the flames. So I am going to go under the filter menu to distort and I am going to the Wave filter. And when this dialogue box opens up on the horizontal scale I am going to take that down to one and I am just going to have my vertical to 30%. The amplitude for both is 118 and the wavelength—you can kind of play around with this. This gives you a great scale preview of the jitter or the waveform that it is going to take on and if you will increase the number of generators and it is just sort of disappears but I want just like a little bit of wave in there in my settings. So I have got my generators at 38, wavelength down here 118 and 290. For the Type, you can use Triangle or Sine is a little bit more zig zaggy so, I think I am choosing triangle here for a little bit more subtle effect. And what it does this I am also going to go immediately afterwards into the Edit menu and choose Fade Wave. This opens up the fade dialogue box so I can further manipulate that or make it a little bit more subtle. You can experiment with playing with the blending modes on this too, like that, screen and multiply it is a little too strong at the top. Back to normal and I think I am liking the normal a little bit better. So I am just a going to fade back to 50 on this and add another motion blur. Filter, Blur, Motion, there we go really, again, I am going to do the distance at 150 so, it is really looking like flames. So we are pretty much set on that right now. And what I am going to do is come up here to the very top I am going to collapse my group, highlight the very top layer. And in the previous videos from matching up this subject to the background we used that photo filter. And this one I am going to show you how to use either the levels or the curves on midpoint target eyedropper to dialing a color. And let me show you what I mean. I will just go to levels these particular target eyedroppers are in both levels and curves. So, with the top layer highlighted and I wanted actually dial in my selection here. So I am going to come back down, expanded the group and control or command click on the Mask portion of layer one here. That gives me the outline of the subject. That way when I call upon the levels adjustment layer, it will already be masked. That selection will turn into the mask. So come down here and choose levels and you can see right up here we have got the mask. Meaning the white is going to reveal the effect we dial in only on the subject. So come over here to the eyedropper tool, the middle one. The great eyedropper and first let me show you how this works. I am just going to highlight it. This is normally used for color correction to neutralize the colorcast if it is in an image. So if any images taken high key on white and you see a pink color cast or wedding dress it is white, often times you use this to click in the neutral area that suppose to be a gray and it will neutralize it to that color. And I will show you what I mean. Now this image it might is more difficult to find a neutral area. We use our color memory for that, looking for sidewalk or shadows and white walls or gray wall, something that is supposed to be gray. Now she is not wearing anything gray. We have no sidewalk. The only area that we can target is the eye white. That is the only area that by color memory we know that these shadows should be a neutral gray. So with the default settings of the target which are add an RGB value of 128 right in the middle of the 255 levels. If we click in here it is going to neutralize any color cast that it finds in that gray area. So I am just going to click once and you can see that the image has been neutralize. So that great area is being a little bit too warm. So what I am want to do, undo that, number one, so I am just going to go to Edit and Undo. Dial that in again and go to levels and this time instead of using the default target value for the great eyedropper. I am going to double click on this eyedropper which opens up the color picker to select the target color. So if I come out here and select to say an area of the flame to be the new target color and click OK. And then still with that midpoint highlighted, if I come in here and again select that eye area that is supposed to be neutral. It is going to apply the new target value to this image that orange color. So I am going to click OK on this. And you are going to get a dialogue box when you do, asking, if you want to save the new target color is the defaults and of course you do not. You want to say no here unless your batch processing a bunch of images that you want to use this. You are going to say no because you want the default values of 128, 128, 128 in the RGB fills. So say no. And then you come up here and you can tweak the effect of this by lowering the opacity. I am going to shut the visibility on and off with this. And she is being remapped into this environment in a more realistic matter. So you will just dial in where it looks good. Up here is a little too much it is still okay, again, it is a subjective matter of taste. I am just going to dial this down probably to about 36%. And since we have levels adjustment layer, we can further edit that as well by double clicking on the icon of the levels adjustment layer. And if we wanted to bump up or down, we would use this middle slider. And that would bump it up. This way would bump it down. I am just going to leave it at one for right now. If I wanted to increase the black point area, remapped that, I would move this over and you can see that is adding some more contrast to it. And that end etcetera. So these are very valuable techniques to understand and to implement when you are doing creative things with your photographs. So I think I am maybe just darkened her a little bit here and click OK. Now there are other adjustments in Photoshop that you can use to balance or unify the subject with its background. This one, you select a target color the flame which was at the background and so that makes it maybe a little bit easier. But you still needs to use your eyes and be subjective about it. Now I can change to this particular levels layer into another adjustment layer by going under layer and change layer content. I have already mask, so I can experiment and show you some other adjustments that you can use to balance the color. And one that is obvious of course is the color balance. And when you go into color balance is totally changed this up here so that is no longer an effect. And then you will dial in your colors to match your background over the image. And here it is very obvious. We come down where it says yellow and blue. And it is got the mid-tones radio buttons selected. So the logic of course I want more yellow so you would move this slider towards yellow and as you do it is starts to get more yellow. Okay. I am going to put this back here because when you move one line in one direction, you can also achieve similar results by moving the other two in the opposite direction. So if I wanted more yellow to dial in with cyan and magenta, I go opposite. I move the cyan to the right and the magenta to the right. And so you can see as I do that it is also dialing in a more goldish color. So you could use all three of these but the one where you are targeting is going to toward yellow and the others are away. And you will do that for the mid-tones and the highlights. Just move it more towards yellow. In the shadow areas, I do not really like a lot of shadows with too much yellow in it. But you can still do that that is the general idea. We are going to for yellow, to warm this up, because there is fire in it. So that is how you would use color balance to do this. I am going to click OK and show you another one going to layer and we are going to change the layer content again and go down to selective color when you use selective color to apply this sort of overlay type of filter, we are going to go into the neutrals. The gray areas and again, what we want to do is add more yellow to this image and in this instance you would move the slider to increase on the yellow line but we do not have like a blue listed over. So we are not going back and forth for more yellow. You would just add more in the percentage. Now when you do this I am going to exaggerated a bit. When you have absolute on it is more like the photo filter when you have luminosity box unchecked to preserve luminosity. When you choose relative, it preserves serving more of the luminosity and again if you move yellow to the right, if you wanted to increase yellow using the other color sliders you go the opposite direction here. So serve like a seesaw with one to two ratio and on the blacks, if you want to increase that, it is going to make it a little bit darker. And again for this way of overlaying, you would use neutrals and possibly your whites. If you wanted to add more cast into the white areas of the pixels and again if you use absolute it is preserving less of the luminosity it is putting more of the effect on relative is a little bit more subtle. Again, it is a matter of taste on what you want to do. So I am going to click OK there. So this is the end of this tutorial but keep your files on hand. We are going to go into a new project using both example one image the female and a male and apply some of the concepts that we have learned to a third image. We are going to bring both of them into a background so, keep this videos, bookmarked, and your files, I provided the images which you can download and there is a link to those, if you look to the right in that column on YouTube. Where it says more info about this video, click on that link and then look down to the area where I say you can download these images.

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Hi! This is Mama Shan with another video tutorial in our Green Screen series. If you have been following along your image should be in this state where we change the background experimenting with some of the built-in preset patterns that Photoshop has to offer. In this section of the tutorial, we are going to further and I am going to show you another way to change the values of the skin tone to match the background other than the photo filter.

The photo filter is not in all versions of Photoshop so I want to show you several other ways that you can remap that lighting effect on your subject. So this is where we left off and this is where we are going to. We are going to simulate a fire background in Photoshop. So let us get started. Just minimize this and so you can see this is where we left off. We have separated that layer style so have that particular skill under our belt to play with.

Now what I am going to have you do is to actually delete these two clipping mask layers that we had applied to the color fill background. So we will just Shift click to highlight them both and you can just hold down your Alt key if you do not want the dialogue box or confirmation of the deletion to come up and drag them to the trash icon.

And so now we have just got our extracted image on the color fill background. The first thing that we are going to do is change the color fill. I am going to double click on this and I am going to select an orange color. And for the fire effect, what we are doing is basically targeting an area that is between the red and yellow that way will get that sort of two tone fire color by doing that. And you can—if you want something other than a fire color, you can go in between and use this colors that imply a little bit of one color or another. Like this cyan would do it in violet would do it and the yellow green would do it so you get that two tone but for fire we want to target right in the orange area at—and we are going to start of with this high intensity in the upper right hand corner. Click OK.

Now to this color fill we are going to add some effects. So click on the effects icon with that color fill layer highlighted, enter the effects and we are adding a pattern overlay, the layer style box opens up. And you want to click in the pattern window this little triangle here which opens up the choices the library for it. If you do not seek what we are looking for is clouds and if you do not see it, you can easily get to it by clicking the other fly out tab here and choosing reset patterns and then just click OK. And it is going to replace with the default patterns which if you look down here remove this up again, clouds is the last one in the default set. So highlight clouds and then you want to scale this all the way up to 1000.

And we are going to reduce the opacity. We are going to play with this a little bit later but I am going to reduce the opacity inside here to 60 and leave at it normal blending mode. And while we still have the layer style box open, click on the name gradient overlay. So that it is highlighted and brings up the properties for that particular gradient. And we are going to change the blending mode of we are going to use a black to transparent gradient.

And since we have—so we are going to choose foreground to transparent here and with your foreground color is anything other than black, you still select this but click on this first stop and change it to black. Double click and choose black and then over here, you want this to be black, but up here in the transparency stop which is right above it, you wanted to say opacity zero.

So click OK on that, and then we are going to change the blend mode of this to color burn. Now, what we are trying to achieve is to have the lighter area at the bottom and the darker area at the top. So, if yours is already set like that that is fine otherwise just click reverse. And now we are starting to dial in this sort of fire reappearance. And you can reach right in to that image window. And change the position of that gradient by dragging and you can see that we are starting to get kind of a fiery appearance here.

You can also play with the scale of the gradient which is will choke or expand it. And as far as the angle goes, you want to leave that at 90 degrees and that will work best for that. And if you change the opacity, you are going to dial in if you lower that opacity of color burn. You will see more of those clouds up of the top. So increasing the opacity in the color burn mode is going to choke out some of those top clouds, starting to look more like fire right now.

Okay. Now you could leave this as is and then it will work for fire but we are going to repeat what we did in the last tutorial, separate this and add some filters to that pattern overlay layer to make it look even more like flames. You can also change the color. We dialed in an orange but I want to show you how this effect changes when you choose different colors. That is a little too dull.

But if we come up here and say choose the cyan. You can see that two tone of the blue and the cyan appearing. Choosing just a regular primary is not going to give you that much jitter or difference on the effect but going into this in between colors secondary or tertiary colors, you are going to get that effect that you want. So we will just come back down here and I will dial in that orange color, like that and click OK.

So what we want to do is create layers from this effects so that we can add filters to them. So we are going to right click on the effects icon that is directly on the layer to open up the fly out tab and choose to create layers option. And that is going to get us our clipping mask. They are clipped to both of these to this bottom layer that is underlined. And we are going to highlight the pattern fill layer which is clouds and we are going to start it off by adding a little of motion blur to it. So I am going to filter blur, motion blur and just dial this into taste and the angle should be again a negative 90 or 90 degree.

So it is going straight up and down. If I decrease the distance it is not doing much and you do not want to go too far at least you like that effect but we are trying to give it a simulation of being like flames. So I am just going to add maybe 150 on this and you can experiment with some other filter as well to distort the flames. So I am going to go under the filter menu to distort and I am going to the Wave filter. And when this dialogue box opens up on the horizontal scale I am going to take that down to one and I am just going to have my vertical to 30%.

The amplitude for both is 118 and the wavelength—you can kind of play around with this. This gives you a great scale preview of the jitter or the waveform that it is going to take on and if you will increase the number of generators and it is just sort of disappears but I want just like a little bit of wave in there in my settings. So I have got my generators at 38, wavelength down here 118 and 290.

For the Type, you can use Triangle or Sine is a little bit more zig zaggy so, I think I am choosing triangle here for a little bit more subtle effect. And what it does this I am also going to go immediately afterwards into the Edit menu and choose Fade Wave. This opens up the fade dialogue box so I can further manipulate that or make it a little bit more subtle.

You can experiment with playing with the blending modes on this too, like that, screen and multiply it is a little too strong at the top. Back to normal and I think I am liking the normal a little bit better. So I am just a going to fade back to 50 on this and add another motion blur. Filter, Blur, Motion, there we go really, again, I am going to do the distance at 150 so, it is really looking like flames. So we are pretty much set on that right now. And what I am going to do is come up here to the very top I am going to collapse my group, highlight the very top layer.

And in the previous videos from matching up this subject to the background we used that photo filter. And this one I am going to show you how to use either the levels or the curves on midpoint target eyedropper to dialing a color. And let me show you what I mean.

I will just go to levels these particular target eyedroppers are in both levels and curves. So, with the top layer highlighted and I wanted actually dial in my selection here. So I am going to come back down, expanded the group and control or command click on the Mask portion of layer one here. That gives me the outline of the subject. That way when I call upon the levels adjustment layer, it will already be masked. That selection will turn into the mask. So come down here and choose levels and you can see right up here we have got the mask. Meaning the white is going to reveal the effect we dial in only on the subject.

So come over here to the eyedropper tool, the middle one. The great eyedropper and first let me show you how this works. I am just going to highlight it. This is normally used for color correction to neutralize the colorcast if it is in an image. So if any images taken high key on white and you see a pink color cast or wedding dress it is white, often times you use this to click in the neutral area that suppose to be a gray and it will neutralize it to that color. And I will show you what I mean.

Now this image it might is more difficult to find a neutral area. We use our color memory for that, looking for sidewalk or shadows and white walls or gray wall, something that is supposed to be gray. Now she is not wearing anything gray. We have no sidewalk. The only area that we can target is the eye white. That is the only area that by color memory we know that these shadows should be a neutral gray.

So with the default settings of the target which are add an RGB value of 128 right in the middle of the 255 levels. If we click in here it is going to neutralize any color cast that it finds in that gray area. So I am just going to click once and you can see that the image has been neutralize. So that great area is being a little bit too warm.

So what I am want to do, undo that, number one, so I am just going to go to Edit and Undo. Dial that in again and go to levels and this time instead of using the default target value for the great eyedropper. I am going to double click on this eyedropper which opens up the color picker to select the target color.

So if I come out here and select to say an area of the flame to be the new target color and click OK. And then still with that midpoint highlighted, if I come in here and again select that eye area that is supposed to be neutral. It is going to apply the new target value to this image that orange color.

So I am going to click OK on this. And you are going to get a dialogue box when you do, asking, if you want to save the new target color is the defaults and of course you do not. You want to say no here unless your batch processing a bunch of images that you want to use this. You are going to say no because you want the default values of 128, 128, 128 in the RGB fills. So say no.

And then you come up here and you can tweak the effect of this by lowering the opacity. I am going to shut the visibility on and off with this. And she is being remapped into this environment in a more realistic matter. So you will just dial in where it looks good. Up here is a little too much it is still okay, again, it is a subjective matter of taste. I am just going to dial this down probably to about 36%. And since we have levels adjustment layer, we can further edit that as well by double clicking on the icon of the levels adjustment layer. And if we wanted to bump up or down, we would use this middle slider. And that would bump it up. This way would bump it down. I am just going to leave it at one for right now. If I wanted to increase the black point area, remapped that, I would move this over and you can see that is adding some more contrast to it. And that end etcetera.

So these are very valuable techniques to understand and to implement when you are doing creative things with your photographs. So I think I am maybe just darkened her a little bit here and click OK. Now there are other adjustments in Photoshop that you can use to balance or unify the subject with its background. This one, you select a target color the flame which was at the background and so that makes it maybe a little bit easier. But you still needs to use your eyes and be subjective about it.

Now I can change to this particular levels layer into another adjustment layer by going under layer and change layer content. I have already mask, so I can experiment and show you some other adjustments that you can use to balance the color. And one that is obvious of course is the color balance. And when you go into color balance is totally changed this up here so that is no longer an effect. And then you will dial in your colors to match your background over the image.

And here it is very obvious. We come down where it says yellow and blue. And it is got the mid-tones radio buttons selected. So the logic of course I want more yellow so you would move this slider towards yellow and as you do it is starts to get more yellow.

Okay. I am going to put this back here because when you move one line in one direction, you can also achieve similar results by moving the other two in the opposite direction. So if I wanted more yellow to dial in with cyan and magenta, I go opposite. I move the cyan to the right and the magenta to the right. And so you can see as I do that it is also dialing in a more goldish color.

So you could use all three of these but the one where you are targeting is going to toward yellow and the others are away. And you will do that for the mid-tones and the highlights. Just move it more towards yellow. In the shadow areas, I do not really like a lot of shadows with too much yellow in it. But you can still do that that is the general idea. We are going to for yellow, to warm this up, because there is fire in it.

So that is how you would use color balance to do this. I am going to click OK and show you another one going to layer and we are going to change the layer content again and go down to selective color when you use selective color to apply this sort of overlay type of filter, we are going to go into the neutrals. The gray areas and again, what we want to do is add more yellow to this image and in this instance you would move the slider to increase on the yellow line but we do not have like a blue listed over. So we are not going back and forth for more yellow. You would just add more in the percentage.

Now when you do this I am going to exaggerated a bit. When you have absolute on it is more like the photo filter when you have luminosity box unchecked to preserve luminosity. When you choose relative, it preserves serving more of the luminosity and again if you move yellow to the right, if you wanted to increase yellow using the other color sliders you go the opposite direction here.

So serve like a seesaw with one to two ratio and on the blacks, if you want to increase that, it is going to make it a little bit darker. And again for this way of overlaying, you would use neutrals and possibly your whites. If you wanted to add more cast into the white areas of the pixels and again if you use absolute it is preserving less of the luminosity it is putting more of the effect on relative is a little bit more subtle.

Again, it is a matter of taste on what you want to do. So I am going to click OK there. So this is the end of this tutorial but keep your files on hand. We are going to go into a new project using both example one image the female and a male and apply some of the concepts that we have learned to a third image. We are going to bring both of them into a background so, keep this videos, bookmarked, and your files, I provided the images which you can download and there is a link to those, if you look to the right in that column on YouTube. Where it says more info about this video, click on that link and then look down to the area where I say you can download these images.

Transcription by: Scribe4you Transcription Services

Photoshop Mama's Greenscreen-Example 2 on fire background

How to Make a Green Screen Background in Photoshop -

How to Make a Green Screen Background in Photoshop -