Hello Everyone! :wavey:

It's been a while since I've been on here.

I consider myself an semi-advanced Photoshop user but I'm stumped on this simple little task! I just had the chance to shoot some pictures on a chroma key (blue) backdrop and I'm having a heck of time trying to figure this out.

I know how to use the magic wand to select the background and then delete the chroma key color. It works great on regular objects but when it comes to people, I know there has to be an easier way to work around the hair issue.


Is there some way other than the magic wand to pick ALL of the same color plus or minus 20 pix of shading variance? What I mean is to pick all the blue screen...even those 50 little spots in a persons hair that you can see the chroma key through? It takes forever to pick all those spots out and I hate cloning them in. I know there had to be a way to take the color picker and select the color you want rid off, add a little variance to make sure you get it all and pull all of that color out of the picture "AT ONE TIME"? I'm sure a green screen would be better than a blue one but the one I was able to use is blue. Please tell me there is a way to do what I described above? The magic wand method is just painfully slow and leaves the hair area looking jaggie.


Thanks in advance!
Dan Browning

Have you tried the "Select color range" tool. If that doesn't work you can go to channels, pick the one with the most contrast, make a copy and create a mask.

Kurt Murphy has a good tutorial on how to do that here (http://www.creativecow.net/show.php?forumid=58&page=/articles/murphy_kurt/natural_selection/index.html).

Michael

I think similar to Kurt's tut, Alt + select Layer>New Fill Layer>Solid Color Fill. Select "Use Previous Layer to Create Clipping Mask" and change mode to Color. Click OK and use Color Picker to choose sample hair color.

Ctrl + I to invert the Solid Color layer mask and paint over the Blue spill with a large white brush.

Cheers
Dave

To get rid of bleed through in hair, it is often effective to just create a new layer set to colour blend, now ctrl + click on lower layer to select hair. Back to colour layer, sample hair colour and paint over areas where there is bleed through. Not always effective, but often has desired effect without too much work.

Thanks to everyone!
I'm going to try them out right now.

the easy way...scroll down to Advanced Masking movie.

http://www.russellbrown.com/tips_tech.html