A Fortunate Mistake

Yesterday was Halloween, and we had planned to attend a costume party with several other family members.  I thought it would be a good opportunity to play around with green screen (chroma key) photography.  I brought my portable studio equipment which includes a Cowboy Studio backdrop stand, Cowboy Studio umbrella lights, clamps, my camera equipment with fresh batteries, etc.  But as I finished assembling the lights and backdrop stand, I realized that I forgot to bring one important thing: the green screen.  Doh!

Normally I would shoot subjects in front of a green screen and then use FXhome PhotoKey to subtract the green background and superimpose it on a creative background.  As a substitute, I borrowed some bedsheets.  One was beige, and the other was pink, so I decided to go with pink since nobody was wearing pink that day, or at least not that particular shade of pink.  Despite PhotoKey autodetecting what seemed to be the correct shade of pink as the key, I was unable to tweak the settings so that it would only subtract the background without interfering with the subjects in costume.  This is not a criticism of PhotoKey; if anything, it is likely user error or simply not possible given the colors in my setup.

I have manually masked photos using Photoshop in the past, but I know it can be a laborious process.  Therefore, I decided to experiment with masking applications that claim to save a lot of time.  I landed on Vertus Fluid Mask, and I really liked the application.  I don't know anything about its edge detection algorithm, but basically it does a really good job of finding edges and allows you to designate certain areas to be included or excluded (masked) by simply pointing and clicking.  Here's what a sample photo looks like after Fluid Mask automatically detects edges (and before I make any of my masking selections):

From there, it is easy to use a brush to click or paint in any region to mask it.  There are fine-tuning options that enable you to manually mask where edge detection has failed, but I found that I didn't really need to use it often since my subjects were pretty well lit, and the default edge detection seemed to be highly accurate.  Before my daughter could say "trick or treat" one last time, I was compositing images like these:

I consider myself fortunate to have forgotten my green screen, as it forced me to look into other masking options.  I guess masking is easier than I thought, especially with an application like Fluid Mask to help you out.  In fact, I'm wondering if I really even need the green screen as much as I thought I did in the past.  My next step will be to see how well masking works under the typical lighting conditions that I have without my studio lights.  In the meantime, may the Force be with you!