Green screening and my latest contest photo.
Posted: Wed Feb 15, 2012 5:16 pm
It was suggested to me that I write up a post of exactly how I did the latest photo for the contest, so I'm writing up a little tutorial on how it works.
The concept I had for this photo was a take on the screenshot from American Beauty.
The photo was done on a green screen, with an added background that I also made up myself.
At first I thought about buying a lot of artificial rose petals and just lay then all around and under her, until I saw the cost. So, I ended up just buying one small box of them and had to get creative. I decided to use my green screen muslin for this shot ($55 at http://www.tubetape.net/servlet/the-4/s ... -10/Detail) , and then would use the artificial rose petals and some artificial flowers to make my own background.
The first step was getting a full frame shot from directly overhead. Since my tripod is not tall enough, I had a friend who has a $400 tripod with a gimbal help me. We attached the camera via USB to my laptop and put it in live shot mode, so I could hold the camera way high in the air (12 feet!) using her tripod and gimbal and see the shot on the screen as we were lining it up, then she snapped the photo from the laptop itself. This is the resulting picture from that (I shrunk down the original as it was 3168x4752 in size).
Ok, so first after that, I had to remove the green screen. That was pretty simple, by simply doing a color select and with enough fuzziness to clear out all of the green, then spent a couple hours worth of cleanup to clear out the halo effect that occurred from spillover. Spillover happens when you place your subject directly on the green screen, but it couldn't be helped in this case. Also, because I couldn't stretch the green screen really tight on the floor, there were wrinkles and that makes it a bit harder to clean out the screen in one shot. (unfortunately I didn't save the image of her removed from the green screen)
Next I had to make the background. First I took a Styrofoam block like this one (http://www.buy.com/pr/product.aspx?sku= ... d=33733883 - note, not the exact same one but similar), and stuck the artificial roses into the block to hold them into place in a random pattern, and also covered it with the rose petals. The result looked like this:
Then, after cropping, fixing the perspective, and doing an offset filter and using the clone stamp tool with a medium-large brush and a 100% softness, I had the final background texture, which I turned into a pattern in photoshop:
Then I simply made a solid black layer behind Andrea and used the pattern overlay style on the background, and reduced the scale so it matched her. After that, I played with the lighting to make the background a little darker, lightened up Andrea, and added her signature.
The final image came out like this:
All in all, it took about 5 hours for the entire process, but I think it was worth it.
The concept I had for this photo was a take on the screenshot from American Beauty.
The photo was done on a green screen, with an added background that I also made up myself.
At first I thought about buying a lot of artificial rose petals and just lay then all around and under her, until I saw the cost. So, I ended up just buying one small box of them and had to get creative. I decided to use my green screen muslin for this shot ($55 at http://www.tubetape.net/servlet/the-4/s ... -10/Detail) , and then would use the artificial rose petals and some artificial flowers to make my own background.
The first step was getting a full frame shot from directly overhead. Since my tripod is not tall enough, I had a friend who has a $400 tripod with a gimbal help me. We attached the camera via USB to my laptop and put it in live shot mode, so I could hold the camera way high in the air (12 feet!) using her tripod and gimbal and see the shot on the screen as we were lining it up, then she snapped the photo from the laptop itself. This is the resulting picture from that (I shrunk down the original as it was 3168x4752 in size).
- IMG_0009_smaller.JPG (953.92 KiB) Viewed 6072 times
Ok, so first after that, I had to remove the green screen. That was pretty simple, by simply doing a color select and with enough fuzziness to clear out all of the green, then spent a couple hours worth of cleanup to clear out the halo effect that occurred from spillover. Spillover happens when you place your subject directly on the green screen, but it couldn't be helped in this case. Also, because I couldn't stretch the green screen really tight on the floor, there were wrinkles and that makes it a bit harder to clean out the screen in one shot. (unfortunately I didn't save the image of her removed from the green screen)
Next I had to make the background. First I took a Styrofoam block like this one (http://www.buy.com/pr/product.aspx?sku= ... d=33733883 - note, not the exact same one but similar), and stuck the artificial roses into the block to hold them into place in a random pattern, and also covered it with the rose petals. The result looked like this:
- rose background before.jpg (572.11 KiB) Viewed 6072 times
Then, after cropping, fixing the perspective, and doing an offset filter and using the clone stamp tool with a medium-large brush and a 100% softness, I had the final background texture, which I turned into a pattern in photoshop:
- rose background.jpg (732.7 KiB) Viewed 6072 times
Then I simply made a solid black layer behind Andrea and used the pattern overlay style on the background, and reduced the scale so it matched her. After that, I played with the lighting to make the background a little darker, lightened up Andrea, and added her signature.
The final image came out like this:
- AR_American Beauty.jpg (310.47 KiB) Viewed 6072 times
Hollywood special effects next stop! 
