A week ago, I was lucky enough to stumble across a post on Plurk from Daeberethwen Arbenlow about a tutorial she had made for removing a green screen in Photoshop.
Though I had watched various tutorials on the same subject and attempted it numerous times, I could never get to work as cleanly as the videos showed.
It may be that I have more experience with Photoshop now, but I’m chalking it up to the terrific job Daeberethwen does of explaining in her tutorials. 😀
Since the green screen video, I have used the method with great success. Just yesterday I cajoled my husband into logging into SL so we could take a holiday photo.
I had set up all my props in front of a green screen so that I could insert a different background later in Photoshop. We could have just gone somewhere winter-y and taken the pic, but I wanted to try out my new skill. 😛
Also, it gave me an excuse to sort through my giant folder of ‘Christmas’ items and purge some of them. (How do I end up with so many no-copy items that are useless to me for sets?!)
This is the edited photo and what I will be using for Christmas cards. 🙂
I used several techniques I learned in videos from Daeberethwen, including the green screen removal and using the ‘screen’ layer style to add effects.
I am still amazed at how quickly and cleanly I can now add effects and fancy bits to my photos with very little effort!
I changed my ‘green screen’ to blue, since so many of the props have green in them. I did have to lower my tolerance a bit with the background eraser, because at 100% it was erasing much of his tuxedo!
I added a background texture (the snowflake background behind the pergola), changed the hue of it a bit, and then used the ‘screen’ layer trick to add some snow as an overlay.
After adding the text, I think the total time to process this photo was maybe 20 minutes. For comparison, here is the original photo:
As you can see, I cropped it (sorry, Frosty!), removed the blue screen, and then added my other effects.
Simple!
I love playing around in Photoshop and learning new techniques. I have a ton of pre-made filters and actions I’ve found in various places, but I get much more enjoyment out of discovering how to do something myself. 😀
If you’ve been looking for some great Photoshop tutorials, I highly recommend Daeberethwen’s videos. You can find the tutorial on using the ‘screen’ layer here.
I can’t wait to try this out with other photos and effects!
A Kat and A Mouse 