Do you ever struggle with finding an interesting background for your portrait photos?  Green screens are here to help.  The idea is to photograph your subject in front of specific colors, chromakey green or blue, and replace that with a more appealing background.  You can do this with either photos or with videos.

Making a video for your business?  Take the clip in front of a green/blue screen and drag in your company’s logo during the editing process.  This is what Paul did in last weeks video on rugged compact cameras.  If you missed it, check it out here!

There are many different products available to make the editing process as smooth as possible.  Muslin backgrounds make it easy to fit several people in your shot.  Editing software such as Adobe Photoshop Elements, Adobe Premier Elements and iMovie make it possible to drag and drop in the new background on your computer.  Westcott’s Green Screen kit comes with the background, digital backgrounds, and software so you can easily switch out the backgrounds.  Companies like Savage offer tons of different digital backgrounds for you to choose from, or you can use images from your own library.

Check out this video tutorial where Paul puts it all together for you:

A few tips, chromakey green is a color that is not commonly worn in clothing and is not represented in skin tone.  It will make the process easier to cut out your subject during editing. If you are taking a photo of something that is green, like a holiday photo in front of the Christmas tree, use chromakey blue.  Also, if your subject is wearing lighter colors, make sure they don’t stand to close to the background.  Otherwise you may get color casts or “green spray” on that lighter color.  Experimenting with digital backgrounds adds a whole new element to our photography.

Here’s another video from Westcott using their kit:

Bonus Bits:

The super cool tripod dolly Paul was using in the video can be found here.  It can be used for tripods and light stands!

Don’t forget to have fun!

Tara