Shooting Kids XMAS party at work..

[Dave Clee]

This year I wanted to do things a bit different and I thought of hanging up a bluescreen background behind Santa with kid shots..
That way I could make my own XMAS background in PS. Once I had the template made it would be a simple drag and drop for each picture..

Anyone used the bluescreen b4 for this kind of thing ? I am assuming it would be pretty easy to key out the bluescreen in post correct ?

PS - select color range, select the blue background and then invery selection should get me Santa and the kids pretty easily right ??

Or am I heading down the path of hardwork and long hours ?

Any advice would be appreciated.

Cheers

Dave

[pathfinder]

Dave, I have not done this, so take any advice I am foolish enough to offer with a huge grain of salt. But since no one else had volunteered to wrestle with the lion.....

I would strongly suggest that you try this for a few frames before signing up to do it for how many kids? 25-30 or more??

I suspect how long it takes depends to a certain extent the quality you are willing to settle for.

I just always find that learning on the job like this invariably leads to lots more work than I expected, but maybe that's just me.

If it is just a matter of selecting the background, inverting and drag and drop that should go fairly easily. If the kids have blue clothing on, then your task may involve a little more work. I would not want to have to 'extract' a whole of bunch of images :dunno

[ziggy53]

Previous discussions:

http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=75805
http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=11782
http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=40330

[pathfinder]

Ziggy, great links.

Seems like they are saying what I suggested, that it can be a little more work than just drag and drop.

The green screen can leave a rim cast on the subject without careful attention to lighting. Clothes need to be chosen carefully. The background needs smooth even illumination so that it is all a similar tone in Photoshop.

But can be fun to do when all is finally ready to go.

[jogle]

I work in film visual effects so blue/green screens are a daily curse.

You might like to know that video packages like After Effects and Combustion have very sophisticated tools for quick keying. Not only is it easy to pick a few shades of the blue, they have erroding tools for nicely working around the edges they also have tools for "de-spilling" that is getting rid of the blue light that gets reflected off your screen and onto the subject. I don't know if they have demo versions you can try out, but would be worth a look. The advantage of doing it in a video package means you can do all your pics in one go. There are also plugins like ultimatte that do a great job.

As for shooting. Try and keep a good distance between your subject and the screen, a few meters if that is possible. Try to light your screen fairly brightly without washing it out and make sure it is lit evenly. Then try and light your subjects in a way that compliments the lighting in your replacement background. make sure shadows fall in the same direction etc.

[Dave Clee]

Thanks everyone for the great replies...
Definitely learned a ton of things that I wouldnt of thought of.

Still looking into the blue screen or
just buying a backdrop for the event.

Cheers

Dave