Best way to chroma key a greenscreen without a plugin effect

[davidbeisner2010]

I've got several hundred greenscreen photos of athletes at the school where I work, and I need to put them on a custom background. I've seen lots of recommendations for chroma key plugins, but don't have any and don't have budget to buy any. I've tried using the Select: Color Range command, and found it works pretty well for the guys, but it falls apart when we get in close around the girls' hair...

What's the best way to utilize the controls within Photoshop Extended CS5 to chroma key a greenscreen out of an image (working with RAW files) so I can put a new background in?

[Guest]

Have a look at this video: CS5: Green Screen Removal for Paintings

http://www.russellbrown.com/tips_tech.html

This action also works fairly well:

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/exchange/index.cfm?event=extensionDetail&extid=2215027

MTSTUNER

[davidbeisner2010]

Thanks!

What I ended up doing was converting the image to CMYK (found that the next step didn't work at all if the image mode was RGB), did Select: Color Range and then instead of using the dropper tool to select my background (it wasn't very evenly lit) I told it to select all greens. That gave me an excellent mask, which only carried over into my subject if they were wearing black. If the subject was wearing black, all I had to do was use the marquee tool to do a rough deselection of the black areas on the subject. Then I hit the delete key four times to get a good clean removal of the green, and was able to drag my background in place and save. I was able to create a good action to do the whole process, which only had to be hand-done on the 5-6 subjects wearing black (out of 78 total!)

Appreciate the suggestions!