in this bonus video want to talk about a different type of extraction which is on green screen now a lot of people wonder why would I use green screen if you can do nice extractions off of gray and white in photo shop and that is actually a really good question and the answer is I wouldn't do it normally if I have ah white background or a great back when I'm just as happy to shoot on that for if I know I'm doing extractions the one advantage of green screen is I figured out a way where I can automate extractions in other words create an action that automates taking someone off of the green screen and putting them on a separate background is the on ly color I've been able to figure out a way to do it with any accuracy and have it done automatically now I'm adding this bonus video to the section on making selections because it kind of makes sense there will also talk later on of course about how to make action so for this bonus when I talk about how to make the action don't worry too muc...

h if you're not feeling with actions because we will be talking about that in a later session so again the idea the reason why I would do this is things like photo booths or youth sports photos or something where you have aa lot of photographs to extract someone very quickly the good news is when we do this extracting you'll see it's still separates them onto a separate layer using a layer mass so if the results aren't ideal you khun still tweak it so here's how it works one of the advantages that having someone on a green screen is that I could look at it differently normally when I look at an image and I looked at the channels panel looks like this red green blue and we saw before we could do channel based selections but if I change the mode to l a be color then these are the channels that air here and when I went to the h al I thought there's already a pretty good contrast between the great background and the later gray person so we take that a channel and duplicate that's very important and I'm running to fill I'm gonna change it to the whole time this most gonna be overly overlays this wonderful magical mode that changes the way color work so when I hit okay you'll see the light gray areas get lighter but the other grey in the background doesn't get affected too much then go back to fill this time fill it with black in overlay now the reason that we're doing it this way through the phil command do this a couple of times is again I haven't had to touch any pink brush or anything so that means all of this khun b automatically done using an action so one more time back to the phil command and backto white let's see little bits of gray there click okay and that's a pretty darn good channel I would say so then we commander control click on this toe loaded as a selection and then we go back to our layers we can use refine ej and I have a pretty good extraction that I could then turn into a layer mask so let's do that again but this time we're going to do it as a and action now again don't worry we will go through all the steps of actions in a few days from now but the other thing I want to mention very briefly is part of the success of green screen is how you take the photos so giving yourself lots of distance between the subject and the background how it's lit is very important because that's half the bow all right so now we go to our actions panel I've already got a set of actions here I'm going to make a new one call it green extract or something I could spell all right and I was going to record these steps so we're going to change the mode so I'm basically doing the same things I just showed you l a b mode goto the channels panel click on the a channel duplicated then we're going to fill white overlay fill and I'm just using a keyboard shortcut to cut to the chase but you could do it using the phil command or the edit menu I should say do black overlay a couple of times and then back to white one more time then we command control click to load this as a selection go back to the main channel make sure we have some selection to one hit refine edge now for now I'm not going to adjust anything here I'm just going to tell it save our output to a layer mask and click okay and then let's just say that as a psd file and then stopped recording now the one thing that I will do here that will talk mohr again with actions is I want to be able to tweak this steps I'm gonna click on this little box beside that we'll talk about which is like a little interrupt switch all right so now if we go back and let's close this up and just to show you that it doesn't have to be a particular image let's use a different one and then try our action so hit play it goes all the way down to refine edge and at this point I could look more closely and say all right I do want toe try to use that refine edge on his hair a little bit and then click okay and then it continues when we look in the layers panel we get this pretty darn nice looking mask now again just to show that it wasn't just because I used it on that particular image here is a completely different one play again same thing at this point there's still a little bit of manual effort but imagine the difference between being able to go in and just do a quick will refine edge on certain areas as opposed to everything in each case it was to show you the mass looks pretty darn good now in this case I thought because there was green and his shirt I just have to go in here and just include that ugo now as I said the main reason why I would do green screen this way or with an action is so I can do many photos at the same time so let's quickly again we'll talk more about batch actions later on but should show you the idea let's go back here I have a siri's of photos that were taken at a wedding it's not really a wedding it's a fake wedding but anyway and I go tools photoshopped batch and tell it let's use the one that's called my actions green screen and let's make just saving close them and okay now in this case it's still going to stop me at every step and say do you want to tweet the layer mass I could if I was doing hundreds of these I could turn this off but for now I'll just let it go through each time as if I was tweaking it so again if I was going to do two hundred I would turn this off and do it later with refined mask which would be easier all right so let's take a look at what we got so here is all of my say files now in this view it doesn't look all that great because when they say it is a psd for some reason it has to put white in there but let's just look it one of them you can see that overalls pretty good when I do look at the mast yes indeed it does need some extra work but again that would not be a major issue to go in and tweet the mask and make sure I had this looking the way it was supposed to just by painting in our good friend overlay mode so that's the idea of doing green screen is the fact that we can record in action to do it day to day I would use white or gray backgrounds because it's frankly easier I don't have any worry about grin frank green fringing on people but again keeping enough distance between the subject and the background and proper lighting we'll make this work a lot better and it's great for situations on one automate extraction of a bunch of people really quickly in a way that still is non destructive because it gives me access to the mask to tweak it further

Class Materials

bonus material with purchase

30 Days of Photoshop - Bonus PDF Supplements

Homework Files

Q&A Check In with Dave Cross

buy this class

$00

Buy Class

Sale Ends Soon!

starting under

$13/month*

Unlock this classplus 2000+ more >

79.7K Students

99% Recommend this Class

00 Student Work

0 Video lessons in HD
00h 00m of class content
Exclusive bonus content
Lifetime access, anywhere, anytime
Streaming access on desktop and mobile browsers
Download and offline access with class purchase
Offline sync with our iPhone & iPad apps
100% satisfaction guarantee

Dave Cross

For 25 years, Dave Cross has been helping photographers and creative professionals get the most out of their Adobe software. Since 1987, Dave has taught Adobe Photoshop®, Adobe Illustrator® and Adobe InDesign® to thousands of users around the world. He has a Bachelor of

SEE INSTRUCTOR'S CLASSES

topics covered in this class

Adobe Photoshop Photo Editing

Ratings and Reviews

Melinda Wong

Very good teaching. I really liked how clear Dave was with everything, the order he taught the material, and I thought the stories were very helpful. I REALLY wanted to understand photoshop and extremely thankful for his wisdom and knowledge. Thank you so much! This is what was holding me back from getting my photography started! :) It just seemed so intimidating and now I have a greater understanding.

a Creativelive Student

Lots of information! Initially I thought I'd just watch the free version as I already have several Creativelive videos on Photoshop but I really like how the classes are broken into subjects and shorter, 1 hour sessions-it will make reviewing much easier! I love Dave's teaching style-he covers everything very well. (Plus the fact that he's Canadian, eh?) :D Thanks for offering such a great course! I'd would love to see Dave do a similar one on Illustrator.

a Creativelive Student

I'm a beginner and have found that the information Dave gives is great, although a little to fast at times. I'd like to buy the course but am curious. If I purchase can I watch it and pause it and rewind it? That would be extremely important to me. Thanks for a great service CreativeLive...

2,000+ classes ranging from fundamentals to advanced techniques.

Bonus Video: "Green Screen"

Bonus Video: "Green Screen"

Lesson Info

32. Bonus Video: "Green Screen"

Lessons

Class Introduction

Overview of Days 1-15

Overview of Days 16-30

Preview of Content, Part 1 - Layers, Comps, Styles, Masks

Preview of Content, Part 2 - Smart Objects and Paths

Day 1 Introduction

Day 1 Exploring Photoshop

Day 1 Realistic Expectations

Day 2: Best Practices I Part One

Day 2 Best Practices I Part 2

Day 3: Lay of the Land

Day 4: Best Practices II – Working Non-Destructively

Day 5: Layers I

Day 6: Layers II

Day 7: Layers III - Masks

Bonus Video: "Layers"

Bonus Video: "Vector Masks"

Day 8: Getting Images In and Out

Day 9: Resolution, File Size, Resizing

Bonus Video: "Free Transform - Warping"

Day 10: Cropping (Straightening)

Day 11: Adjusting

Day 12: Smart Objects & Smart Filters I (Introduction)

Bonus Video: "Copying Smart Filters"

Day 13: Smart Objects & Smart Filters II (More Advanced)

Day 14: Retouching I (Replacing, Removing, Moving)

Day 15: Retouching II (Fixing, Portrait Retouching)

Day 16: Quiz & Review

Day 17: Shapes, Paths, and Patterns

Day 18: Selecting I

Day 19: Selecting II (Compositing)