Are you sick and tired of capturing (plus viewing) the identical old pictures, over and over again? You’ve discovered that “blue screen” may be the route to go, except you don’t really understand it or even know much about it? Here is everything you’ll want to know to apply it as a photography background!
First…What exactly is it?
You will hear the expressions “green screen”, “blue screen”, and “chroma key” tossed about and used to mean the same thing when discussing a photography background.
Chroma key only could be defined as having a backdrop which is one solid, evenly lit color. The blue and green tend to be the most common colors. In reality, you could use ANY color – however green and blue tend to be best. I am going to explain why that’s the situation in a minute.
Green screen systems can be used inside either video and still photos. You shoot someone in front of the blue screen and then later (or at the same time working with high quality video cameras) you remove the solid color and swap it with anything you need!
It’s the way the local meteorologist does the weather report. They are standing in front of a green screen and the camera digitally strips it out and puts in the local weather map. They’re looking at themselves on the monitor to determine where to point and so on. It can be perplexing and harder than you may think to be a weather reporter!
Secondly…Why green or blue?
Typically we employ blue and green because they are the farthest from the colors present in skin tones. The procedure was primarily accomplished by blue, although as the standard of cameras improves, green seems to work more efficiently. It’s a lot easier to strip out of the backdrop, consequently most studios are changing to green. But it doesn’t do any harm to have them both.
Another advantageous point for green is that it generates less clothing conflicts.
Since color is automatically deleted and substituted, if the model is wearing a shade of that color (blue) as part of their outfit…it will be replaced. You can frequently see shirts and ties that turn into humorous looking holes in the subject – showing through to the brand new background.
It has even occurred with blue eyes!
Green tends to generate not as much of a clothing conflict, it’s easier for your cameras to work with and it’s easier to light uniformly.
Flat illumination is crucial because shadows on the background will appear in the end product. This could damage the realism of the photography background. And more, employing irregular light, you would create altered shades of the color…several of which may not get eliminated accurately.
The 3 primary sorts of green screen backgrounds are: paper, fabric and paint.
Paint is useful when you’ve got a studio using a cove and you do all your shooting there…it is useless should you ever have to shoot on location.
Paper comes in big rolls, but is easily torn and continuously needs replacing. This tends to get expensive in a hurry.
Fabric tends to live longest and is transportable. And fabric is easy to clean (dirty blue screen backgrounds don’t work well).
Any material supplier can provide some cloth that can accomplish the job. Buy a little and do some experimenting with your photography background, any photo editing program can take out the color. Take a crack at it, you’ll like it!
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