Frame by Frame Masking/Keying?

[Simon Ruschmeye]

Hey All!

I've shot some GreenScreen-Footage but it turned out very bad, its impossible to key the Green separated from the yellow suits. So now I'm thinking to mask the green frame by frame in Photoshop, and I'm wondering which tools to use to minimize the time spent working on every frame.

Here are my thoughts so far:
- is their any chance to separate the yellow suits from the background by doing adjustments to the colors, contrast, curves etc.?
- I use layer masks, so for every next frame, I can use the mask from the frame before and just do adjustments. Do you think it's the right way to do it?
- for the heads I'm wondering if I should use the magic wand tool or the Extract-Filter. The magic wand seems to be faster but less accurate. What do you think?
- is their a different tool which does the job better and faster? Maybe I dont know it.

Any tipp would be so much appreciated!!!
Best regards, Simon

[tekermiller]

Hi Simon,

Are the frames recent or done some time ago? Really for this type of shot I would have gone for a bluescreen rather than the greenscreen as this would easier lent itself to pulling a workable matte. How many do you have? If you have some time I will take a look?

Best regards,

Paul Miller
Creative Director
e-touch creative services limited

[mistermonday]

The colors of the BG and subject are almost identical so that normal separation techniques will be very difficult. You should be able to get good results using an extraction tool like Topaz Remask 2 or extract the subjects manually using paths in combination with some of the other selection tools. The other thing you will need to do are a number of color corrections because the green has been reflected / spilled onto the subjects skin and a few other areas.
Regards, Murray

[unimatrix001]

a quick 5 minute removal of background. duplicate the background layer. used a hue saturation adjustment layer choose an area in the background that gave me a yellows 2 layer in the list. set the saturation to -73 and the lightness to -63 then used the magic wand tool to make several selections on the background, add a layer mask to the selected area. then with the layer mask selected invert it to remove the background. then discard the adjustment layer.