PHOTOSHOP - Green screen problem solving

Let’s say you have an assignment to shoot a car on location but you find that the subject can’t be moved, and the background is crap anyway, yet the client needs a cool shot. How are you going to separate the car from the background if you don’t have a green screen roll with you? As a way out, see if you can buy a small piece of green material at your local fabric shop. Any green will do really when it comes to removing background. So with a couple of willing helpers, plus your tripod. set your camera up on the tripod and don’t move it. Then take a number of frames with the same exposure, whilst your friends move the green paper around the car and on the ground in front of it. Do this until you feel you have covered all of the car/subject. You may only need six frames for a shot like this. I have only included four of the frames I took here, but you get the idea.
Later in Photoshop I extracted the car (below) and created the new background, as per what the client was looking for.

THE STAGES

a.

b.

c.

d.

e. Photoshop in progress

f. Car extracted from background

50% opacity shows layer beneath

Car and ground covered

Removing green screen

Selective colour to remove green cast on car

On your computer and in Photoshop, open all the six images and drag them all to one file. So that you have one file with six layers. By changing the Opacity to say 50% you will see the layer beneath it with the green in a different position. You simply erase everything in the top layer except the green bit. Change Opacity back to 100% to check it, once happy merge the top layer with the one beneath by ‘Cm-E’. Continue doing this until the car has green all around it. Note the final extracted version has the windows cut out and replaced with transparency added, so the (a) background will be visible through them. In post production (Photoshop) you simply select the green and delete it, leaving your subject on a transparent background. This way you can add any background you want. Problems occur when there is ‘spill’, that is reflection off the screen onto the subject, but this can be overcome in post production. So it is a quick and easy way to add that extra dimension to portraits, product shots, in fact anything, and gives you a lot of flexibility as a location photographer. Click here for a tutorial for a similar but more elaborate scenario.

All photography and information © Jon Davison 2021

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