Remove Green Screen with Adobe Photoshop Elements

Hello

Although this is an old forum post I have found it by searching for a similar solution.

For such a tool with so many features it does seem strange that it is not an easy thing to do in Photoshop.

Like you I use green screen in Elements for video editing with good results. I also take a lot of photos for eBay, and (as already suggested) just use the bucket tool with a suitable colour and zoom in to clean up green pixels remaining with the same colour.

But here is another suggestion which is more like true green screening. Anyway this is the way I have done it. . .

I open a jpg with a background I like; use the colour dropper to pick the colour in the area I am going to drop the person photo.

Switch to the person photo and change the background colour to dropper colour; use the bucket tool to fill the background; crop the photo as required.

You may still need to zoom in and touch up green pixels around hair.

You may also have to match the image size to the background image size.

Save the person image as a jpg.

Go back to background image.  Go to File, Place and select your person.jpg - resizing and placing is possible.

This is my quick example:-

Sridhar,

I used the freeware PSE add-on GML Matting to remove the background. This tool extracts an item from a picture and places it on a transparent background.  It works especially well in extracting fine areas such as hair, as you can see in my example:

http://www.pixentral.com/show.php?picture=1ONLQGu6d8KTj10ii8Y2a6RSPmB5m

I added the white layer so you can better see the result. In a few small areas where GML Matting did not remove the green, I selected around these areas and applied a Hue/Saturation change where I selected green from the pull-down list and moved the Saturation slider all the way left to remove the green. In a couple tiny areas this didn't work, so I again selected these areas and applied a Hue/Saturation with the pull-down list default of Master and moved the Saturation left to totally remove the color. Since the selected areas included some of the hair and the hair was dark anyway, removing the color was negligable.

Oh yes, I also did some playing around with color correction and levels to brighten her a bit.

If you want I can upload my changes, either the psd or a jpg version.

You can download GML Matting at

http://research.graphicon.ru/image-processing/gml-matting-6.html

Well, as far as I know, PSElements doesn’t have “Croma Keying” ability...

Try the “Magic Extractor” and see how you like the result...

(you might have to clean-up some edges manually)

Regards

Nolan