How to Refine the Mask of a Green Screen in Photos Video

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Photoshopmama's Green Screen Masking Tolerance & Refining

Hi! This is Mama Shan with another tutorial in the Green Screen series. And I know in the last video that we have already extracted the image and apply the layer mask to it but I want to go over some other finessing techniques and to show what happens when you select to this image using the wand tool at a lower tolerance setting. So I am going to do that right now and select the magic wand tool which is right here in CS3. Instead of using a tolerance of 64, I am going to use a tolerance of 30. I am going to make sure the first little icon to create a new selection is highlighted and just click in the green area and then I am going to hold my Shift key down and click in this other areas, still holding Shift down, still holding Shift down and then I am going to Spacebar Control key or Spacebar Command on a Mac and zoom into this area, hold the Shift key down because if you do not hold that Shift key down when you have this icon selected it will deselected the other areas and just select the new area you are adding to an existing selection. So again we are going to double click on the background. I am going to call this Layer 1, click OK. Then I am going to Alt or Option click on the Mask icon at the bottom of the layers pallet to add that mask and what we are going to do is slip layer real quickly going over to the create fill adjust icon at the bottom and do solid color. When the color picker opens up I am going to choose a reddish color and drag this slip layer underneath. Now at a lower tolerance setting if you compare this with the last video and I get this question a lot. Where people say, I made a selection but there is still that edge around it. Well that edge is around it because I chose a lower tolerance setting. So initially selecting a tolerance setting that gets close enough in it helps out. But there are some things that you can do to the mask directly that can suck this mask in closer to the image. If it is pretty even all the way around which it looks like it is and let me zoom in a little bit further and you can see that there is a lot more edge showing up around this image. Then there was, when we selected it would a tolerance of 64, but we are going to do some mask editing and this techniques work in all versions of Photoshop’s since version four. There are some new tools in CS3 for refining a selection but I am going to show you the old way because it works in all versions and then on another tutorial. At some point I will show you how use the refine selection which basically is in the background employing some of these basic techniques that I am showing you today. So highlight the Mask right here so that it says Layer Mask and I want you to have an understanding the black and the white and I am just going to Alt click on here to bring the big picture of the Mask into the main window here. I am going to select the move tool because I do not want accident like create selection, if I click there. The white area here is the selected area. This is the area that has being revealed and the black is the mask. It is masking that background out. And there is a command in Photoshop under the Filter menu, under the other category. There are two of them, one is called Maximum and one is called Minimum. I used to be very confused to remember which one is which in this one and how you can remember it is—it is referring to the white are. It is referring to that light area. If you want a maximum amount of that white area, if you want to add to it, increase the selection you would choose maximum here and if you can find tune not an increments of single pixels. Minimum would mean that you want to shrink the white area and so that would be making the revealed area, a little bit less. As of now what we want to do here. Okay. So I am just going to come back out here and Alt or Option click on the mask to show the picture again. Again using this thumbnails as reference is helpful, we can see that the white area is revealing a little bit too much of the background which is still there. Shift click, that is not deleted it is still there. Shift click on the mask to turn it of for a minute shift click to on it again to turn it back on. So since we are seeing that green fringe around it, we need to minimize the white area, the reveal area, we want that to be a little bit smaller. So with the Mask highlighted, we are going to come in here to filter other and minimum and when the minimum dialogue box opens up notice how and I hope you can see this in the video I am going to zoom in to this edge here and shut the preview off. It is off now. Now when we add that radius of just one pixel in the other minimum filter box, see how it just sucks right in closer to the area. Now if we go up higher, it is going to start sucking away a lot of the image. So usually in this box we are only implementing a one or two radius. Again, it depends on that initial tolerance that you set for the selection. So what I am going to do is leave that at one and we still have still a little bit of fringe but if we go back to filter other and minimum again and do another one it seems like I will look around here. I am going to use my Spacebar that lets me move around. It is not too bad actually. So a little—maybe a little rough but not too bad but it is sucked away and we still have to do some manual clean up on some parts but I am just looking here and I am going to check the preview on and off. Really it is doing a good job. Coming in there the second time. Okay, I am going to do that and click OK. And now it is still needs to be a little bit smoother around the edges and maybe so that it will blend in although it is pretty darn smooth. Here is another thing that we can do to the mask and this involves using another filter and it is called Gaussian blur. So go into blur and Gaussian blur. Again, make sure that mask is the part you have highlighted, also I would like to mention sometimes not always, even though we are on the mask sometimes when we go to some of this filters like the blur filter and I do not know if it is a glitch in my Photoshop but sometimes it adds a little blur to the image too when it is not supposed to but if you click this chain link in between the two that really separates them. and let me show you what I mean by separates them. First let me link that again and when it is linked like that when I move the image, the mask moves with it. So the Mask is always around the image no matter where I move it. Okay. So it is a link, they are one. Now if I unlink the two of this and I have the Mask selected and I move, it is moving mask. I am going to undo that with a Ctrl+C on the PC, Command C on the Macintosh. If I highlight the thumbnail of the image and move it when it is unlink then the image is moving behind the mask. That is something cool to know because you might be able do something creative with that as well. I am going to undo that again Ctrl+C on a PC, Command C on a Macintosh and so one thing to remember is after we do the blur filter and some other things on the Mask, link it up again because it should only be unlinked temporarily. So I am going to highlight the mask and let us zoom in on the edges a bit and particularly around the face. I am going to zoom in at a ratio of 100%. Notice when I do a Command minus here are 66.67amount, things will go a little jaggy and again that is because it is a cashed view. For accuracy purposes when you are editing, you should look at even multiples of 100. So looking at it at 50% would be better than 66%, looking at a 100% even better. So all right, we will go to filter blur and we will go to the Gaussian blur command and just with a one pixel amount, you can see that that has smooth up that edge quite a bit and looks very nice just like this. So we have created a really nice Mask even starting out with a lower tolerance amount and it might even be a better mask. I am going to click OK just blurring that edge of teeny tiny bit. Now if you wanted add more sharpness or clarity back to that Mask or reveal or conceal a little bit more of the image, here is another menu command for image adjustments that you are used to using for correcting exposure and coloring contrast in Photoshop but it is also a terrific tool to use in masking on the Mask directly. So again make sure the mask thumbnail is highlighted it says Layer Mask up here and directly go to image adjustments and levels. This is applying it directly to the mask. We are not using adjustment layers here we are using this adjustment directly on that eight bit channel mask and when you come in here. I am going to try to move this up so that you can see the edges as well and I am going to zoom in, say at 200% here and move this over. Where did my levels go? Did it disappear? Okay. Let me do it again. Image, adjustments, levels, okay, now as you know in exposure and just general image correction to increase contrast in the levels dialogue box, it is a process of moving a black point slider and the white point slider towards each other. So again, these are representative think in terms of the mask the black is controlling, the black area of the mask, the mask itself. The white point slider is controlling the white area. So if I were to move the white point slider over quite a bit. It is going to give me more white area like the maximum filter we do another. See how the green fringe has showed up again conversely moving the black point slider is going to suck it in some more. I am going to move I am exaggerating this just so you know how it works. You can see we are loosing some stuff here. You can also use the midpoint slider and moving it to the left is going to increase the white areas. You can start see that by increasing the white area that is the revealed area and you can see some of that green showing through. Moving it to the right is going to suck it in a bit too. So I do not think we need to change anything, I just it to show you that this is another tool and how to use it when you are trying to refine the edges of your mask. So I am just going to hit cancel out of here and come back like this. Now I am looking at this image and again this is about making a perfect selection and I see some areas where I am going to have to put back and I will Shift click on this mask and there is a little bit of that earring that needs to come back the rest of it. I am actually going to change this color here to a gray with a little bit of a red tint to it. I am going to lock that mask again just so that I do not or link it rather to the thumbnail. Okay. In selecting a brush to finesses area that I want to bring back, I do not want an airbrush and I do not want 100% hardness on the brush and the reason why is because I have already made this edge, I am going to Alt click on it so you can see, where it is got a little bit of smoothness to it. It is not totally feathered out like an airbrush would do but it is not totally hard either. So this is where a little bit of trial and error comes in. I am going to click the brush tool and then come up here and select a hard round brush but then what I am going to do is adjust the hardness here. I am going to start out with just giving it 50% hardness. Now if I had it all the way down to zero, it would be feathered out quite a bit like an airbrush but what I want is a little bit of smoothness so I am just going to start out with a 50% hardness and see how that works. And click out here and then make my—since it is around, I am going to use that. I need to switch that foreground to white because what I want to do is reveal a little bit more that earring right here. I want the edge to mesh with the existing edge that has been created with those other methods and that seems to work pretty well and looks pretty good. And I am going to Shift click on this just to look at the image over here and I need to add a little bit more here and let me come back in history and see over here it looks a little too soft to me. So let me come back in history to my brush tool and back here and make it a little harder, maybe go up to 75%. Hit X, clean up, I am just using the very edge of that diameter. The outside diameter of the brush that just kind of clean up. And this indeed is made another pretty good selection. Down here, I am clean this up just for the very outside edge of that brush I am click release, move the position of my brush without holding down the mouse button and then I will hold my Shift key down and click and it kind of snaps to it. So if you have shaky hands, this is a great method to clean up an edge it is like your just going in little steps and it is following behind with that Shift click. There is something happened down here. That must had happened when I had it moving around so I am just going to get rid off. You do not see this things if you are not zoomed in. So I cannot emphasize strongly enough but when you are trying to do perfect extractions you have to use your navigational shortcuts zooming in look at it close up and look at it far back too. And just quickly go over here like that because I know if it was on that side. It is got to be on this side too. Now I am just using that Shift click method and this is here only because I was showing you how to separate the mask in the image and moving it around. So if you are playing around like that, you may have to do this as well. If you are going straight up another method besides Shift click, if you start out with your Shift key held down and move your mouse up keeping that held down, it does not matter where your cursor is going, it is going to move at that angle, 90 degree angle. It does 90 degree angles and a 180 degree angles you do just start the direction off. All right, now Control minus on a PC, Command minus on a Mac and we have got another excellent extraction here. Now if I want this to fit in the window again I am just going to get my move tool and I am just going to move this down to the edge and I can kind a look at that thumbnail and see that I need to move it to the right a little bit. So I am just going to use my arrow key until that updates in the layer thumbnail so I am not seeing the checkerboards. So let us back to that original position and again just quickly going over the clipping mask technique. You just create a new layer, a new blank layer and I showed you the shortcut of holding down the Alt or Option key in between the two layers and then clicking, you can also find at the layer command to group—create this clipping mask under layer create clipping mask and note the shortcut is Alt+Ctrl+G. That will create a clipping mask and it will undo a clipping mask if you hit that again. So that also creates that. Get my brush tool change the blending mode most importantly to you and this time I will get a nice airbrush, zoom in, Alt click on a skin color without the cast and then just start painting over it like this. I am going to undo that one of maybe make the opacity a little bit less on my brush. Alt click and note that foreground color swatch over here is changing a little bit when I make those samples by Alt or Option clicking that gets that cast out really nice like and again around the shirt make sure you are sampling the shirt color if you are trying to cancel out the cast here. Skin color for the arm then we got clothing here so be careful what you do on this edge. Again for the watch because that is a silver, the easiest way is to hit D and you can paint with black or white on this. Either one will neutralize it. I think in the last video, I use black but I will just hit X and show you that it works with white as well. Let us get that 100%, see how that just making it very silver. Then to clean this one up there is an overspray here and I am going to zoom in to show you that it is spilling over. Get the eraser tool and clean up the spill pretty well. You want it at 100%, I am just going to do my Shift clicking around where it is spilled on to the skin. Just clicking around here like that and then if you want to back off on the neutrality or grayness of it on the watch here to bring back some of that original color, a tiny bit of cast, take your opacity of your eraser tool and bring that down to about 20 and we can just make that really big because we are doing erasing and then just click a couple of times. To bring a little of that back I am going to Ctrl+C on that last one because that really brought back a little bit too much of that gray but I am going to go in here with the eraser tool and get that a little bit of gray. Then go back to your brush and continue around with the method for cleaning the green cast.

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Hi! This is Mama Shan with another tutorial in the Green Screen series. And I know in the last video that we have already extracted the image and apply the layer mask to it but I want to go over some other finessing techniques and to show what happens when you select to this image using the wand tool at a lower tolerance setting.

So I am going to do that right now and select the magic wand tool which is right here in CS3. Instead of using a tolerance of 64, I am going to use a tolerance of 30. I am going to make sure the first little icon to create a new selection is highlighted and just click in the green area and then I am going to hold my Shift key down and click in this other areas, still holding Shift down, still holding Shift down and then I am going to Spacebar Control key or Spacebar Command on a Mac and zoom into this area, hold the Shift key down because if you do not hold that Shift key down when you have this icon selected it will deselected the other areas and just select the new area you are adding to an existing selection.

So again we are going to double click on the background. I am going to call this Layer 1, click OK. Then I am going to Alt or Option click on the Mask icon at the bottom of the layers pallet to add that mask and what we are going to do is slip layer real quickly going over to the create fill adjust icon at the bottom and do solid color. When the color picker opens up I am going to choose a reddish color and drag this slip layer underneath.

Now at a lower tolerance setting if you compare this with the last video and I get this question a lot. Where people say, I made a selection but there is still that edge around it. Well that edge is around it because I chose a lower tolerance setting. So initially selecting a tolerance setting that gets close enough in it helps out. But there are some things that you can do to the mask directly that can suck this mask in closer to the image.

If it is pretty even all the way around which it looks like it is and let me zoom in a little bit further and you can see that there is a lot more edge showing up around this image. Then there was, when we selected it would a tolerance of 64, but we are going to do some mask editing and this techniques work in all versions of Photoshop’s since version four. There are some new tools in CS3 for refining a selection but I am going to show you the old way because it works in all versions and then on another tutorial. At some point I will show you how use the refine selection which basically is in the background employing some of these basic techniques that I am showing you today.

So highlight the Mask right here so that it says Layer Mask and I want you to have an understanding the black and the white and I am just going to Alt click on here to bring the big picture of the Mask into the main window here. I am going to select the move tool because I do not want accident like create selection, if I click there.

The white area here is the selected area. This is the area that has being revealed and the black is the mask. It is masking that background out. And there is a command in Photoshop under the Filter menu, under the other category. There are two of them, one is called Maximum and one is called Minimum. I used to be very confused to remember which one is which in this one and how you can remember it is—it is referring to the white are. It is referring to that light area.

If you want a maximum amount of that white area, if you want to add to it, increase the selection you would choose maximum here and if you can find tune not an increments of single pixels. Minimum would mean that you want to shrink the white area and so that would be making the revealed area, a little bit less. As of now what we want to do here. Okay. So I am just going to come back out here and Alt or Option click on the mask to show the picture again.

Again using this thumbnails as reference is helpful, we can see that the white area is revealing a little bit too much of the background which is still there. Shift click, that is not deleted it is still there. Shift click on the mask to turn it of for a minute shift click to on it again to turn it back on. So since we are seeing that green fringe around it, we need to minimize the white area, the reveal area, we want that to be a little bit smaller.

So with the Mask highlighted, we are going to come in here to filter other and minimum and when the minimum dialogue box opens up notice how and I hope you can see this in the video I am going to zoom in to this edge here and shut the preview off. It is off now. Now when we add that radius of just one pixel in the other minimum filter box, see how it just sucks right in closer to the area.

Now if we go up higher, it is going to start sucking away a lot of the image. So usually in this box we are only implementing a one or two radius. Again, it depends on that initial tolerance that you set for the selection. So what I am going to do is leave that at one and we still have still a little bit of fringe but if we go back to filter other and minimum again and do another one it seems like I will look around here. I am going to use my Spacebar that lets me move around. It is not too bad actually. So a little—maybe a little rough but not too bad but it is sucked away and we still have to do some manual clean up on some parts but I am just looking here and I am going to check the preview on and off. Really it is doing a good job. Coming in there the second time.

Okay, I am going to do that and click OK. And now it is still needs to be a little bit smoother around the edges and maybe so that it will blend in although it is pretty darn smooth. Here is another thing that we can do to the mask and this involves using another filter and it is called Gaussian blur. So go into blur and Gaussian blur. Again, make sure that mask is the part you have highlighted, also I would like to mention sometimes not always, even though we are on the mask sometimes when we go to some of this filters like the blur filter and I do not know if it is a glitch in my Photoshop but sometimes it adds a little blur to the image too when it is not supposed to but if you click this chain link in between the two that really separates them. and let me show you what I mean by separates them.

First let me link that again and when it is linked like that when I move the image, the mask moves with it. So the Mask is always around the image no matter where I move it. Okay. So it is a link, they are one. Now if I unlink the two of this and I have the Mask selected and I move, it is moving mask. I am going to undo that with a Ctrl+C on the PC, Command C on the Macintosh. If I highlight the thumbnail of the image and move it when it is unlink then the image is moving behind the mask.

That is something cool to know because you might be able do something creative with that as well. I am going to undo that again Ctrl+C on a PC, Command C on a Macintosh and so one thing to remember is after we do the blur filter and some other things on the Mask, link it up again because it should only be unlinked temporarily. So I am going to highlight the mask and let us zoom in on the edges a bit and particularly around the face. I am going to zoom in at a ratio of 100%. Notice when I do a Command minus here are 66.67amount, things will go a little jaggy and again that is because it is a cashed view. For accuracy purposes when you are editing, you should look at even multiples of 100.

So looking at it at 50% would be better than 66%, looking at a 100% even better. So all right, we will go to filter blur and we will go to the Gaussian blur command and just with a one pixel amount, you can see that that has smooth up that edge quite a bit and looks very nice just like this. So we have created a really nice Mask even starting out with a lower tolerance amount and it might even be a better mask.

I am going to click OK just blurring that edge of teeny tiny bit. Now if you wanted add more sharpness or clarity back to that Mask or reveal or conceal a little bit more of the image, here is another menu command for image adjustments that you are used to using for correcting exposure and coloring contrast in Photoshop but it is also a terrific tool to use in masking on the Mask directly. So again make sure the mask thumbnail is highlighted it says Layer Mask up here and directly go to image adjustments and levels. This is applying it directly to the mask. We are not using adjustment layers here we are using this adjustment directly on that eight bit channel mask and when you come in here. I am going to try to move this up so that you can see the edges as well and I am going to zoom in, say at 200% here and move this over. Where did my levels go? Did it disappear? Okay. Let me do it again.

Image, adjustments, levels, okay, now as you know in exposure and just general image correction to increase contrast in the levels dialogue box, it is a process of moving a black point slider and the white point slider towards each other. So again, these are representative think in terms of the mask the black is controlling, the black area of the mask, the mask itself. The white point slider is controlling the white area. So if I were to move the white point slider over quite a bit. It is going to give me more white area like the maximum filter we do another.

See how the green fringe has showed up again conversely moving the black point slider is going to suck it in some more. I am going to move I am exaggerating this just so you know how it works. You can see we are loosing some stuff here. You can also use the midpoint slider and moving it to the left is going to increase the white areas. You can start see that by increasing the white area that is the revealed area and you can see some of that green showing through. Moving it to the right is going to suck it in a bit too.

So I do not think we need to change anything, I just it to show you that this is another tool and how to use it when you are trying to refine the edges of your mask. So I am just going to hit cancel out of here and come back like this. Now I am looking at this image and again this is about making a perfect selection and I see some areas where I am going to have to put back and I will Shift click on this mask and there is a little bit of that earring that needs to come back the rest of it. I am actually going to change this color here to a gray with a little bit of a red tint to it.

I am going to lock that mask again just so that I do not or link it rather to the thumbnail. Okay. In selecting a brush to finesses area that I want to bring back, I do not want an airbrush and I do not want 100% hardness on the brush and the reason why is because I have already made this edge, I am going to Alt click on it so you can see, where it is got a little bit of smoothness to it. It is not totally feathered out like an airbrush would do but it is not totally hard either. So this is where a little bit of trial and error comes in.

I am going to click the brush tool and then come up here and select a hard round brush but then what I am going to do is adjust the hardness here. I am going to start out with just giving it 50% hardness. Now if I had it all the way down to zero, it would be feathered out quite a bit like an airbrush but what I want is a little bit of smoothness so I am just going to start out with a 50% hardness and see how that works. And click out here and then make my—since it is around, I am going to use that. I need to switch that foreground to white because what I want to do is reveal a little bit more that earring right here.

I want the edge to mesh with the existing edge that has been created with those other methods and that seems to work pretty well and looks pretty good. And I am going to Shift click on this just to look at the image over here and I need to add a little bit more here and let me come back in history and see over here it looks a little too soft to me. So let me come back in history to my brush tool and back here and make it a little harder, maybe go up to 75%. Hit X, clean up, I am just using the very edge of that diameter. The outside diameter of the brush that just kind of clean up. And this indeed is made another pretty good selection.

Down here, I am clean this up just for the very outside edge of that brush I am click release, move the position of my brush without holding down the mouse button and then I will hold my Shift key down and click and it kind of snaps to it. So if you have shaky hands, this is a great method to clean up an edge it is like your just going in little steps and it is following behind with that Shift click.

There is something happened down here. That must had happened when I had it moving around so I am just going to get rid off. You do not see this things if you are not zoomed in. So I cannot emphasize strongly enough but when you are trying to do perfect extractions you have to use your navigational shortcuts zooming in look at it close up and look at it far back too. And just quickly go over here like that because I know if it was on that side. It is got to be on this side too.

Now I am just using that Shift click method and this is here only because I was showing you how to separate the mask in the image and moving it around. So if you are playing around like that, you may have to do this as well. If you are going straight up another method besides Shift click, if you start out with your Shift key held down and move your mouse up keeping that held down, it does not matter where your cursor is going, it is going to move at that angle, 90 degree angle. It does 90 degree angles and a 180 degree angles you do just start the direction off.

All right, now Control minus on a PC, Command minus on a Mac and we have got another excellent extraction here. Now if I want this to fit in the window again I am just going to get my move tool and I am just going to move this down to the edge and I can kind a look at that thumbnail and see that I need to move it to the right a little bit. So I am just going to use my arrow key until that updates in the layer thumbnail so I am not seeing the checkerboards.

So let us back to that original position and again just quickly going over the clipping mask technique. You just create a new layer, a new blank layer and I showed you the shortcut of holding down the Alt or Option key in between the two layers and then clicking, you can also find at the layer command to group—create this clipping mask under layer create clipping mask and note the shortcut is Alt+Ctrl+G. That will create a clipping mask and it will undo a clipping mask if you hit that again. So that also creates that.

Get my brush tool change the blending mode most importantly to you and this time I will get a nice airbrush, zoom in, Alt click on a skin color without the cast and then just start painting over it like this. I am going to undo that one of maybe make the opacity a little bit less on my brush. Alt click and note that foreground color swatch over here is changing a little bit when I make those samples by Alt or Option clicking that gets that cast out really nice like and again around the shirt make sure you are sampling the shirt color if you are trying to cancel out the cast here. Skin color for the arm then we got clothing here so be careful what you do on this edge.

Again for the watch because that is a silver, the easiest way is to hit D and you can paint with black or white on this. Either one will neutralize it. I think in the last video, I use black but I will just hit X and show you that it works with white as well. Let us get that 100%, see how that just making it very silver.

Then to clean this one up there is an overspray here and I am going to zoom in to show you that it is spilling over. Get the eraser tool and clean up the spill pretty well. You want it at 100%, I am just going to do my Shift clicking around where it is spilled on to the skin. Just clicking around here like that and then if you want to back off on the neutrality or grayness of it on the watch here to bring back some of that original color, a tiny bit of cast, take your opacity of your eraser tool and bring that down to about 20 and we can just make that really big because we are doing erasing and then just click a couple of times. To bring a little of that back I am going to Ctrl+C on that last one because that really brought back a little bit too much of that gray but I am going to go in here with the eraser tool and get that a little bit of gray. Then go back to your brush and continue around with the method for cleaning the green cast.

Transcription by: Scribe4you Transcription Services

Photoshopmama's Green Screen Masking Tolerance & Refining

How to Refine the Mask of a Green Screen in Photos -

How to Refine the Mask of a Green Screen in Photos -