Photography By Michelle

Have you gotten to the point of being sick and tired of photographing (and viewing) the same old photography, time and time again? You’ve heard rumors that “green screen” may be the way to go, but you don’t truly understand it or even know a lot about it? Here’s all you must know to apply it as a photography background!

Firstly…What exactly is it?

You will hear the expressions “green screen”, “blue screen”, and “chroma key” tossed around and employed to mean the same thing when discussing a photography background.

Chroma key simply could be defined as using a backdrop that is one un-patterned, uniformly lit color. The blue and green are the most common hues. In fact, you could use ANY color – but blue and green are best. I will explain why that is the situation in a second.

Chroma key strategies can be used in either video and still images. You shoot somebody in front of the chroma key then we later (or at the same time working with high quality video cameras) you subtract the solid color and exchange it with any type of backdrop you would like!

That’s the way your local weatherman/woman does the weather report. They are standing in front of a green screen and the camera digitally removes it and replaces it with your local weather map. They are watching themselves on a monitor to determine where to point and so on. That’s perplexing and more difficult than you may think to be a weather reporter!

Next…Why green or blue?

Normally we use green and blue because they’re the furthest from the colors present in skin tones. The procedure was initially done with blue, although as the standard of cameras improves, green seems to work better. It is a lot easier to strip from the backdrop, so most studios are switching to green. However it does not hurt to own both.

An added beneficial point for green is that it creates less apparel conflicts.

Since the color is mechanically stripped out and replaced, if the model is wearing a hue of that color (blue) in their clothing…it will be changed. You can time and again see shirts and ties that become peculiar appearing holes in the model – showing through to the brand new background.

It’s even happened among blue eyes!

Green tends to create less of a apparel conflict, it truly is a lot easier for your cameras to work with and it’s simpler and easier to light uniformly.

Smooth illumination is essential because shadows falling on the backdrop will appear in the final product. This could ruin the realistic effect of the photography background. And, with irregular lighting, you would obtain numerous hues of the color…some of which may not get removed correctly.

The three major varieties of chroma key backgrounds are: paint, paper and fabric.

Paint is useful if you have a studio which has a cove and you do all your projects there…you’ll find it useless in the event you ever would like to shoot on location.

Paper can be purchased in huge rolls, but is easily torn and always needs replacing. This may get expensive in a hurry.

Cloth tends to live longest and is transportable. And fabric is simple to wash (unclean chroma key backgrounds do not work well).

Any fabric supplier can offer some material that could accomplish the task. Buy a little and do some playing around with your photography background, any photo editing program is able to strip out the color. Take a crack at it, you will enjoy it!