Chroma Key Green Screen Christmas Card

December 27, 2009 Photography

Here are the steps I took to create this years Christmas Card.

Blogged By:

Team Louish

This years Christmas Card was put together using the following:

5D Mark II
Sigma 12-24mm wide angle lens
Adobe Lightroom 2.6
Adobe After Effects CS4
Jasc Paint Shop Pro 7.04

The photos of the people are each taken with 3 lights. One on the left, one bounced from the right, and one bounced off the ceiling. I used the 12-24mm wide angle lens because of my tight workspace conditions, otherwise, I would of used a 50mm had I had the available room. My green screen is in a small bedroom, so I always end up using my 12-24mm to get the entire screen in the shot. The photos were taken at 17mm, ISO 400, 1/13 sec at f/13. The background photo of the tree was at 24mm, ISO 800, 0.6 sec at f/5.6. The chroma green screen was removed using Keylight 1.2 in Adobe After Effects (Keylight comes with After Effects). I create a new After Effects project at the same dimensions of my photo. Import the photos, drag it to the workarea, apply the keylight filter, eyedropper the green, change the workarea bar length to 1 frame (so you dont export 5 seconds of footage), choose file, export, Image Sequence, choose PNG, export 1 frame per second. This will create a transparent PNG with the green completely removed from the photo. From here, you can open all your PNG's in Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro and compile your image. I used Adobe Lightroom to finalize the photo.