I’m looking for some sort of software or even a way to do it in photoshop where I can hook up my camcorder or digital camera and allow people to pick their own backgrounds and print a 4x6" picture with them there. I could find backgrounds and blue out the part I want and I’m wondering if there is a way to do it in photoshop easily. Another idea is my camcorder. I have a camcorder that does bluescreen effects and actually comes with a few jpgs but will not work with ones that I create. Anyone have any ideas there?
If you have any questions just ask! Thanks in advance!
I don’t use Photoshop, but I think it’s fairly easy to do there (or in an equivalent program). Here’s what I think you do:
1: Take a picture of your subject in front of a uniform-color background. You want something that contrasts well with their face and clothes; blue and green would probably both work well.
2: Get that picture onto your computer, and open it in Photoshop. This shouldn’t be too difficult, if you have a digital camera.
3: In Photoshop, use the floodfill tool to make the background completely uniform in color. You should be able to set a tolerance on the floodfill, so it’ll treat all of the blue the same (even parts that are slightly shadowed or whatnot).
4: Set that color to be transparent, and then copy the entire image.
5: Open up the image you want to use as your background, and paste the portrait on top of it.
-Make your various backgrounds as different layers in a Photoshop file.
-The tool you want in Photoshop is called the “Colour Select” tool; it’s the magic wand-esque thing that will automatically select the colour (in this case your background).
-Then hit delete to "erase’ the background.
-Turn “on” whichever underlayer you want as your background, and save as a jpeg (it will flatten it into one image for you).
There are a whole host of ways to do little details and to apply touch ups and effects, but there are the very basics. Here’s a more in-depth way to do it using colour channels.