How To Employ The Chroma Key Photography Background

by drewloupsen on July 27, 2010

Have you gotten to the point of being sick and bored with photographing (and seeing) the identical old photography, time and time again? You’ve discovered that “chroma key” could be the route to go, however you don’t really understand it or even know a lot about it? Here’s all you must be familiar with to utilize it as a photography background!

Firstly…What exactly is it?

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

Chroma key simply means using a background which is one solid, evenly illuminated color. The blue and green tend to be the most typical colors. In fact, you are able to work with ANY color – however blue and green tend to be best. I will make clear why that is the situation in a second.

Blue screen strategies can be employed in both video and still photographs. You shoot someone in front of the green screen and then we later (or instantly using high quality video cameras) you eliminate the solid color and trade it using anything you would like!

It is the way the local meteorologist does the weather report. They’re just in front of a chroma key and the camera digitally deletes it and puts in the area weather map. They’re just looking at themselves on a television monitor to see where to point and so on. It’s perplexing and harder than you may think to be a weather reporter!

Second…Why the colors green or blue?

Generally we employ blue and green because they’re the furthest from the colors present in skin coloration. The procedure was originally accomplished by blue, however as the standard of cameras improves, green seems to work better. It can be easier to strip from the background, subsequently most studios are switching to green. But it really doesn’t do any harm to possess them both.

An additional beneficial point for green is that it results in less clothing conflicts.

Since the color is automatically deleted and substituted, if the model is wearing a hue of that color (blue) in their outfit…it’s always changed. You can often see shirts and ties that develop into humorous looking holes in the model – showing through to the new background.

It has even happened with blue eyes!

Green tends to make not as much of a clothing conflict, it happens to be a lot easier for the cameras to work with and it’s less difficult to light evenly.

Flat light is crucial because shadows on the background will appear in the end result. This can destroy the realistic effect of the photography background. And more, working with irregular illumination, you’d get different shades of the color…some of which might not get deleted accurately.

The three main sorts of blue screen backdrops are: paper, fabric and paint.

Paint is good when you’ve got a studio which includes a cove and you do all your photos there…you’ll find it worthless in case you ever need to go on location.

Paper is available in large rolls, but is easily ripped and continuously needs to be replaced. This can get costly in a hurry.

Fabric tends to stay fresh best and is portable. Plus material is easy to wash (unclean blue screen backdrops do not work well).

Any material store can offer some material that could accomplish the job. Buy some and do some experimenting with your photography background, any photo editing program can take out the color. Test it, you will enjoy it!

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