Welcome to another tutorial, brought to you by photoshoptalent.com. Today, we are going to be looking at the art of Chroma Keying. For those of you who do not know Chroma Keying is the process of removing a solid background from your foreground subject. In this case, we are going to be removing the green background, which will allow us to put anything we like behind our subject.
Now, there are few ways that we can go about doing this. I am going to quickly touch on two methods, but more specifically I am going to focus on the method called color range. The first method, which seems to be used the most often, is the magic wand tool method, which is this tool right up here.
Now, basically what the magic wand tool does is when you click on a selection, it takes all the similar colors that are connected to that area that you clicked and adds them to that selection, by adjusting the tolerance, which is up here, you can tell the magic wand tool to select more of that color or less of that color that you selected. The higher the number the more color will be selected, the lower the less.
And, here is an example, we are going to select the tolerance pretty high, we are going to set to 60. Now, we are going to start off by clicking on one of the colors the most common color in our background and even with a high tolerance you will see that it does not exactly select all the color that we want. There is a little bit of green still in the hair and the little crevasses, it is not that very that accurate. And, if we delete you will see what I mean. You can see that there is still a lot of green and it looks ugly and it looks jagged. It is not that accurate, so we are going to move on, so that is that method.
But now, we are going to touch on a method called the magnetic lasso tool, which is this tool. You will probably see a lasso tool, but if you hold down on your mouse button and select magnetic lasso tool, you will be able to get this tool that we are working with. Now basically, how this works is you are going to start off in a selection and I am going to zoom in here and you are going to click to start and you are going to drag your mouse and it is going to automatically lock to your subject in the foreground, separating from the background, but as you can see it is not accurate at all, there is a lot of green that is still left, it is ugly. I really do not suggest this tool at all. I suggest just leaving it and going on it, but it is an option some people have had success with it, I have not, but you are free. Feel free to use it.
Now, let us move on to the good stuff. We are going to use a method called color range. Now, if we go up to select and click on color range, we are going to get this new dialogue box. Now, basically what this allows us to do, it allows us to select the color of our image and in this case it is going to be green. You can use blue, red, or whatever the color your background is as long as it is not the same color as your foreground subject.
Now, we are going to start off by clicking on the green. See if you click here, we are given wrong selection, but we are going to click on the green and you can see that our subject here has changed to black. The black area shows the area that will not be selected. The white is the area that will be selected. Now, we want to make sure that this is set to black mat. This will show us a much bigger picture of what is selected. Now, the fuzziness controls how much of that color will be selected. The higher the fuzziness the more color, the lower, the less color. What you want to do, you want to drag the fuzziness and slide it to the right as much as you can, as long as your subject stays black. Once it starts filling with color, stop the slider right there.
Now in this case, the green is very similar throughout the whole picture and there is no green in our subject, so it is staying black the whole way. So, that is a good thing. Now, once that is done you are going to click on OK. Now, we have our selection, but it is still not 100%, we click on delete there is a still a little of bit of green and it is not a 100%. So, I am going to do a few tricks here, I am going to undo this. I am going to start off by going up to the top and clicking on select, I am going to modify, and then expand. I am going to set this value to one.
Basically, what this does is it squeezes the selection around our subject. This will allow us to get rid of some of the greens that we do not want, but it is still leaves us with a pretty jagged selection. So, we are going to back up to select, click on feather and set this to one, as well. This will smooth out the selection and make it a lot more crisp, but smooth at the same time.
Once we have all that done, we are going to press delete on our keyboard and that will remove the background from our image. Now over here, we have our two layers we have our layer one, which is our subject layer and our background layer. And, right now once all this is done you can let your imagination soar. You can do whatever you want. You can change the background to a solid color or you can put your subject on the beach.
Basically, if you have a beach picture opened up in photoshop, drag the layer to this picture and make sure it is behind it, if it is not behind just drag it downwards like this, and then adjust the image to your liking. Now, your subject is on the beach that is pretty much it. This concludes our Chroma Keying tutorial, I hope you have learned something and remember check out photoshoptalent.com for more tutorials, contests, and I will se you next time.
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