[Lilit]

I am looking to do Chroma Keying for graduation photos where I teach. Wanted to know what is the best way to do it in order to display students in front of a pretaken photo of Law books. I heard of Darkroom and it may be a little out of my price range to do. Does PHotoshop do Chroma Keying? Any list of programs and the easiest way to do them would be greatly appreciately. Please help me. Also need to know what other equipment would be needed in order to do such a thing.

[Dabhand16]

Hi Lilit - moved you post here as it is an image manipulation technique, and will have better chance of getting the answers you need here.

Chroma keying is a technique used in the video/TV world to enable a background to be inserted behind a presenter. They are usually shot against a blue or green plain background which is then substituted with the required background.

In stills photography, it is much easier! The students can be shot against any background, although depending on the method used to merge the images, a plain background can be advantageous.

There are several ways to achieve the effect that you want, and I am no expert in Photoshop. If you want to 'cut and paste' the plain background will be easiest, as you can select the background by colour, but I think this will not be the best way of doing it as evenn with feathering i think it will look 'stuck on'. You need to be able to use layers what ever method you choose, and layer masks.

I would try these methods, but there are more ways to do this, and someone will probably be able to give you another (and better?) way.

In Photoshop, open both images. I'm not well up enough with PS to know if the sizes and resolutions need to match. Drag the student image onto the books, add a mask to the student layer then paint out the background to reveal the books. Use black to reveal, and switch to white to restore. When you are happy, flatten the image and save.

Or if a plain background has been used, open both images. In the student image, select the background with the magic wand. Then inverse the selection, feather about 5 pixels and copy to a new layer. This new layer can then be superimposed onto the books layer.

HTH - but I'm sure somone who knows better will be along soon.

[Markulous]

Think what you need is Primatte chromakey, digitalanarchy.com

Not cheap, mind, @$299 but at least it'll automate your process

Edit: quite a good DIY Photoshop tutorial - Photoshop Tutorial - "Chroma" Keying

[GainfulShrimp]

I'm a big fan of Corel Knockout for masking out things to put on separate backgrounds, but to do an entire yearbook would be unfeasible (unless you're much better at it than I am!).

For one-offs, though, it's hard to beat. You can mask out hair, fur, liquids... all the kinds of things I'd never dare go near with a lasso tool.

[Rob Barron]

If you are doing this purely for photograh purposes then there really is no difficulty at all. Simply use as plain a background as possible that is of a contrasting colour to anything else in the photo. That makes it easy to select and then to delete. Put the BG image onto a lyer below this layer and there you go, couldn't be easier.

If you are wanting to do it for video purposes then the best way is to use video software like Premiere Pro. Having said that, Photoshop CS3 does now have a lot of useful video tools that can be used for all manner of video purposes like titling, timelines and so forth.

I think from reading your post that you are only talking about for photography which basically means you don't need true chroma keying at all. You simply need a plain background, nothing more really.

Cheers,
Rob

[j sotelo]

Originally Posted by Rob Barron

If you are wanting to do it for video purposes then the best way is to use video software like Premiere Pro. Having said that, Photoshop CS3 does now have a lot of useful video tools that can be used for all manner of video purposes like titling, timelines and so forth.
Rob

Only on Photoshop CS3 Extended,
and heres some more of its video editing capabilities,

(taken from Adobe website)

Video and animation design Movie Paint
Enhance video directly within Photoshop Extended. Now you can paint, add text, and clone over multiple frames of an imported video sequence.

Smooth animation workflow
Easily create animations from a series of still images or video frames with a new Animation palette that enables onion skinning.

Broad video format support, including QuickTime
Import QuickTime movies and most AVI and MPEG files, and output video and animations to MOV, AVI, MPEG-4, FLV, 3G, FLC, H.264 (iPod), and DV Stream.

* Export to the FLV (Flash) video format is available only if Flash CS3, After Effects CS3, or Premiere CS3 (all of which install the necessary export component) is also installed on the same system.

Video layers
Create and edit images for video with maximum quality and a broader range of color models. Edit and enhance grayscale, RGB, CMYK, and LAB models at 8-, 16-, and 32-bit depths with color management.

I do some video editing on this and it works great.

[Rob Barron]

Yup, I meant to say CS3 Extended, thanks for adding that in Sotelo