A couple of evenings ago, my daughter wanted to photograph some of her outfits ready for her University Portfolio. She was unsure about what background we should have so I suggested we go Green Screen or Chromakey as it is also called. This involves shooting against green backcloth though blue is also commonly used. The problem with this is if there is green in the clothes being worn and the green channel will be removed affecting their appearance. As you will see, yellow is also affected as it has a lot of green in its makeup.

So we put up the cloth, set the lights and metered light levels. Jo blew up some balloons too.

Here is one of the pictures of Jo in the dress that was always going to be the difficult one.

As you can see, we were having lots of fun doing this shoot, but note what happens next to the green and yellow elements of the dress once the green has been removed using some specialist software. Jo also decided she wanted a black background, but at this point we could just as easily insert any colour we wanted or even another image altogether as the background. The image was also cropped slightly.

Note also how the blue balloons have become a much richer and darker blue due to the green channel being removed from their colour spectrum. We decided to leave the blue balloons alone as the richer blue was more appealing. But the green and yellow parts need some work to regain their original colour. So, once this image had been saved, it had to be opened in another program and using control point technology I was able to correct the colours to close to their original.

Green Screen shoots can be a lot of fun, why not consider booking one for yourself and friends or family or if you are organising a function, it could be a lot of fun for you guests.