All the blue screen does is make for an easier selected area. It will help.
You should be working in RGB.
The photographer should (since the clothes are blue) use a green screen.
That’s what I thought. The photos have already been shot with our client (who knows nothing) by a professional who should have known better. I have not seen them yet. I have a feeling this will be a challenge.
Not a catastrophe! The blue screen has an unusual hue.
(It is the next best color to green)
…. but I wish (for your sake) that the background was well lit (no shadows).
And he chose to shoot blue clothes against a blue screen — so that they would be easier to silhouette?
Lucky you!
If the photographer didn’t know what he was doing, he should have just stuck with white seamless…. <vbg>
Neil
Well lit Blue is better than white (regardless of clothing color). It requires some backlight for the models to keep the blue out of hair.
Check each channel of the original image to see if any of them gives you a clear selection area. The background blue, for instance, may have more red than the clothing, and therefore be easier to select in the red or green channel. You can also duplicate the channel that has the best contrast, then adjust its contrast levels until it’s easier to select the background.
Silo paths are a bitch but necessary evil most days. A wacom tablet helps relieve carpel tunnel from using the pen tool all day long. 🙂
If the job is large enough you might want to check-out one of the masking plugins such as Extensis Mask Pro, or Corel Knock-out.
Don’t know about compatibility with the Creative Suite.
Otherwise, you might play with Photoshop’s extract feature, but I have never had much success with that (probably haven’t worked with it enough).
You also might try making a selection of the blue screen with the select>color range option (playing with fuzziness to get the right effect around hair, then enter quickmask mode to edit/paint the inner areas of selected blues out, then go back to normal mode and delete the background.
Naturally you will save as, to maintain your original.
Now if clipping paths is what you are after, to use in a layout…
One word: Don’t
Making a selecion out of a copied and manipulated channel, using Knockout (much better than Maskpro) or even trying Extract are all reasonable suggesions. If you have After Effects Pro, you can create a single frame video and use Keylight, which would be far and away the easiest way after the fact to do this. Yes, the photographer should have used a greenscreen, but actually bluescreens are a bit better than greenscreens for skin tone differentiation (unless you are shooting compressed DV footage, which you aren’t). Knocking out a white background generally gives less good results than either bluescreen or greenscreen. One thing to be careful about is edge bluescreen artifacts. The channel manipulation method will not remove these colour artifacts, so if you use this method, you will need to create an edge selection and use either hue/sat or selective colour adjustment layer to fix this. (keylight has controls for fixing this, and is much easier). I think Ultimatte makes a PS plugin just for chromakey work. You could check their website: www.ultimatte.com
Warning: Ultimatte products make Knockout and Maskpro look inexpensive.
