Green Screen Isolation using Lightroom
Everyone is probably familiar with green screen technology – look at some of the fantastic movies and even the weatherman to see green screening (or chroma key) in operation. Stock photographers can use it to extract an object from a background by taking the image against a green cloth and then getting rid of the “green.” Why not just take the image against a white background that is bright enough to burn out to pure white? Well, it is hard to get a good isolation of objects with hairy outlines – a person’s head with fly away hair, or the arm of a man – the hairs just a blown out with the background and it is difficult to expose to see those hairs but still get the background pure white.
Lightroom has some great features to adjust individual colors and so I decided to play with a pure green cloth and see how well I could isolate an arm flipping a coin and get it cut out against a white background for a stock photo. In effect to go from this:
The studio with green background
to this:
Final stock image
I have now included this article, and a further extension to it about how to use blending to improve your extraction and how it fits into the final stock photo in the How To section of my site. You can find the articles here: Green Screen Isolation and the Advanced Blending Techniques.
Dear Sir,
Your article about greenscreen technology in Adobe-Lightromm, not existing any more.
I’m kindly asking you to send me a copy of your article by email.
Thanks in advance,
Best regardes
Cheda
The link has been updated now – it should work properly. Steve
I am also interested about greenscreen usage in Lightroom.
there are other programs to do just that, but it would be awesome if that could be done in Lightroom.
You should find that the link works now. The Lightroom approach isn’t a one-click solution, but it does work nicely
I had the intention to buy Lightroom 5. By coincidence I was just wondering
or Lightroom can also do chromakey. You’ve done a critical test. Very beautiful! Thanks!
How many clicks? 🙂
Which lightroom this great feature? 4 or 5? I can’t find it on the internet.
Lightroom 4 had it – it is the HSL sliders for saturation and lightness that lets you selectively remove the color and adjust the brightness of specific colors.
I haven’t upgraded to Lightroom 5 yet
Steve
Hi your link doesnt work…may I have the link sent to my email?
Thanks,
Vanessa
Hi Vanessa
I’ve done more than you asked – I’ve created a place on my website where I will make these articles more easily available – it is now in the main menu of my site under “How To Articles”
Steve
I’m a totally newby to green screen technology, and I’m trying to find out if I can use my green screen just on photos in Lightroom 5. I want to use downloadable backgrounds (if that’s something that exists?), and put them into lightroom. Is that possible?
I can’t think of any easy way to do that just in Lightroom – you really need something like Photoshop (or the free GIMP program) that is able to extract or mask elements and then put a different background under the transparent areas. Any stock photo library has backgrounds that you can use and I’m sure there are many free ones on the internet as well.