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Green Screen Q&A

this first question is what is the texture of this material here what is the best texture for green screen and can somebody just get out the green paint and paint there bedroom wall or there you know there were any wall in their house with paint great great questions okay so the texture of this this is what it's a cloth green screen it's almost like a velvety type of surface if you were if you were to touch it this is a really great texture for green screen and the reason is is because it's not really that reflective the best green screens are the ones that are the same color throughout so this is this is a pretty good green screen if we wanted to go one step above we actually would use a wall so yeah you can totally paint your bedroom wall the green screen because you can see their their wrinkles and things like that in this piece of fabric and those wrinkles they're going to show up on the camera so when I go to select those color range is there those were different color rages the c...

olor range in the highlight versus a shadow is going to show differently but if we had a very flat surfaces a wall that would actually work a little bit better than this you want a fabric that's goingto have a little bit of like a matte finish to it so it doesn't reflect light and that's just going to help eliminate it's going to help reduce the amount of shadows and highlights that you have so I would say this is it's a very common type of green screen this cloth material you can rent thes and most like a larger cameras houses and things like that another option you have is seamless paper on dh if you guys are ordering this online or whatever you know amazon or your local dealer savage is a company that makes these and they have like it's actually called chroma key green they usually don't have chroma key blue as well and this is a specific green that's designed it's a very very bright green it's designed for shooting on green screen the paper in my opinion isn't as good because it's slightly reflective you know paper like it has that it's it's a smooth surface to it so it's it's a little bit more reflective and it doesn't absorb the light nearly as well if you were going to be painting your room you can actually buy chroma key paint I don't know of any manufacturers off hand but if you were to work with like you know if you were to go on amazon or whatever it is and look for chroma key paint you can actually buy that and natalie usually have a mat surfaces well eso using a nice smooth wall like a smooth texture like that and I'm using green is used really common nowadays but they use blue pretty heavily like ten years ago I'm not sure why the switch really think greene is just less apparent in skin tones and things like that but if you wanted to go blue you could totally do that if you wanted to go red you could do that to remember yesterday we were just selecting out a color tone right now there's red in people's skin but if you were photographing like a blue product and he wanted to be able to cut it out really well you wouldn't shoot it on a blue background if you want to shoot it on a red background you could totally use that so green is used pretty commonly because there's not a lot of green in people skin so selecting out green you know in in photo top using the selective color or in video editing tools most those have chroma key or like you know king software built into them or you can just like adobe after effects for instance I'm sure creative life has wonderful tutorials on using after effects and chroma key and basically that's just a couple of clicks away and then you can remove that green screen in video as well and that's actually it's really fun to do a video too yeah we have one of our top instructors jeff foster does drones and he's are gonna video green skiing green screen guy I like blue screen because I can say it a lot easier yeah yeah thank green screen so awesome that's great aaron so fashion tv says andi this is just along the same backgrounds are there instances or situations where we're better off using white or gray background okay that's a great question um with that I'm gonna add to I'm going to add to that and I'm gonna bring in the color caste question as well which some people might have and the color cross cast question is I'm gonna actually get close to the green saree and maybe you guys could see this like if I were to wrap this kind of like around me all oftentimes we'll have a little bit of green that actually reflects onto my skin like if the light hits a green fabric and then the fabric balances on to me I don't know if this is going to be visible on camera at all but oftentimes like mice skin especially it's like wrapped around something in this case it really doesn't so I'm just look like an idiot right now but oftentimes you'll actually get some of the green on people's skin not just around the edge but like it'll actually reflecting green color onto people skin that's just the way light work so I'm gonna kind of tackle this question in two parts big tip here if you know what background you're going to be putting someone on let's say you're going to be putting someone on like a snow type background you're going to be putting someone in the arctic if you shoot that on a white background it's going to look great because you're using the background color a seamless like shooting with a white seamless you using a background color that's going to be really similar to the final composite and in those cases you don't have to worry about let's say there's a little bit of a white fringe around your subject when you're doing your layer masking you don't have to worry about that if the background they're going into is white as well so if you're shooting someone who's going to wind up being on a white background use a white seamless that's a really great idea unless they're wearing a white dress that's a really bad idea because then you won't be able to cut them out if you're going to be putting someone in a really dark room shoot them on like a dark gray or a black and again we're gonna have a little bit of a black fringe around them when you go to cut them out and photoshopped but if that black excuse me if that matches what's going on in the final image it actually works to your advantage there so there's in my opinion not a problem at all I'm sure when I should people to cut out of the backgrounds I shoot on white I shoot on gray and I shoot on black and it depends on again what they're actually going to be in the final image now green is really interesting shooting on a colored backdrop and the reason is because you do get that color cast you do get that fringe and if you guys remember from yesterday's tutorial I took that green and I I isolated it using a hue saturation adjustment layer isolated that green and then I just shifted it to the right a little bit and I made it blue and that's actually really cool that you can't do with a white or a gray or a black because a lot of the time depending on the environment people are in there actually going to reflect the colors of that environment which it doesn't you know we don't really think about that but just being in this room like I'm getting a little bit of green on my skin from having this green there I'm getting a little bit of white on my you know white reflected here and I'm getting a little bit of a tan on me being reflected on this backdrop here so if you want someone to look real in the background it actually makes sense to have a little bit of the color of the background reflected onto your subject so by shooting someone on green you can isolate that green and then adjusted to the color of their background and then that color caste of the green will turn into the color casts the background and that will actually make that look even more realistic if done right in photo shop which way we showed you how to do that yesterday and we'll go over how to do it again tomorrow awesome looking forward to that for sure because folks are asking what they're like can you show us again how you did that andi it's kind of rare att creative live where they actually get the opportunity to see things twice but we will be doing it again tomorrow which is great rs cost I would like to know what if feet needed to be included would you still use a green screen because our particular one here's not seamless how do you deal in your own personal work with full body with full body okay that's a really good question and that's gonna depend a little bit on on what you need let's say if you need hard shadows to be visible I've done composites before where I want someone who looks like they're standing on the ground and I want that shadow like you can see right now like you can see I have shadows that are visible here so if I wanted these shadows to be visible in the final composite I would want to stand on a material that would allow these shadows to be visible because you can see these shadows or complex shadows are often made up of like many different layers because every single light in this room affect the shadows that are on my feet as well so you want to stand on the surface that's going to allow those those shadows come through so if in the final photo I was to be standing on a hard surface like this I would want to be standing on a hard surface in the studio so this might not be the best green screen for that I might want to use a seamless paper green screen which is going to be very very smooth and then I could be standing on that and again I would get a color cast so like if I were to stand on that green screen in bare feet you'd be able to see a little bit of green on my legs and even if he didn't see it on my legs and person in photo shop you could crank up your huge saturation you'd be able to see it there's well so having that color cast you know on someone's feet you khun you still just like you would with the fringing around someone's body you could isolate that color cast using huge saturation and then change it to whatever value you need if they're going to be on a dark environment you can bring your lightness way down and you could make that dark and keeping in mind you know your shadows and things like that if they're going to be on a reflective surface maybe put a green screen down a piece of paper and then put a piece of lex san overtop of that so then you've got the green and then you've got the reflective material over top of that green hope that answers the question that did all right and then another question here says how do you generally like you ever light the green screen from behind from like would you ever light it like light screen itself okay you know what I mean with with strobes yeah we did yesterday that's a great question so yesterday if you guys remember we had to be flats set up there was one over here and one over here and a b flat is basically just like all the heavy flat right now v fighting just basically two pieces of like foam you have a white side in a black side the black side uses used for subtracted lighting so like if I wanted this side of my face to be darker if I put a black surface right here it would actually make this side of my face darker because it would subtract light if I wanted it to be lighter I would put a white surface right here and it would add like like would hit the white surface and reflect back to my face and make it a little bit lighter so a b flat basically just does that it's just two pieces of phone that air taped together is avi and this was set up yesterday basically shining like this here on our backdrop with a light shining into the interview flat on the white surface so we'll light shines into the v flat it spreads it out where I'm at and it creates a very large light source that then is goes out in this direction think about light almost like water it just bounces around for pretty much infinite it just bounces out around forever so if what if light is shining here it's going to bounce around inside the v flat and then come back out in that direction so we had one of those on either side yesterday and that lit up our green screen really bright so today we don't have those we don't have those lights because we're trying to reduce the amount of stroh's were using in this workshop because I don't I don't want to use twenty strobe and that he knows everything I don't have twenty strokes and we couldn't do that so I wanted to make sure we cut down the amount of strokes that were using so instead of having to be flats here we do have a large front light this large soft box here and that's going to help the light are green screen but ideally yes you would want to let your green screen and you want to light it completely separate from your model which is what we did yesterday correct and along those same lines and raise w would like to know we're sorry not andres how do you prevent the green screen spilling onto this subject so in other words do you move the subject far away from it what what do you do to really have best practices to just I have his little of that light as possible yeah great question they answered the question pretty much in their first year yeah move your subject far away from it and that actually goes like with any background that I'm using I find that's really helpful and you know studio spaces they're hard to come by because just like a big open room like they're hard to come by renting a studio oftentimes is a really good idea but I love the ability to light my background and haven't be far away from my subject and then to be able to light my subject completely separately so if I want my background I have a certain effect on it I couldn't do that with my background and then I can light my subject separately and then the background is not really interfering with what going on in my subject so the same thing with a green screen the closer the subject is to the green screen the light that's on their subject is going to hit the green screen as well so for instance I wouldn't I wouldn't really want my subject to be right here if I had my subjects here and I put a beauty dish right on my subject I'd have a huge shadow on my green screen and we don't want that because you want your green screen tidbit just basically like be a perfectly green surface so you want to eliminate you can see there's a shadow of my hand and my body here on the green screen so when I would go into photo shop and try toe you know cut me out this shadow would show up is a different color here so it would make my job a lot harder when it came to cutting me out so if I just move forward you know then my shadow falls right there on the ground and it doesn't touch the green screen at all so yeah just move your subject a little farther away also for this workshop they do sell a green screen um seamless paper in the nine foot variety and the twelve foot and this is I believe it's a fifteen by twenty piece of canvas would recommend not going with the nine foot because it's I mean nine foot sounds really wide but once you get your subject you know five or ten feet away from your seamless backdrop a nine foot wide backdrop is you know it usually is not going to cover your entire subject so get the largest size green screen you can because you do want your subject to be far away from that like today we're going to have james jumping and this is I believe it's fifteen feet wide right here and he's probably going to pretty much hit the limit from either side because he's going to be farther away from the green screen