Color select for green screen

[scottbaughman]

Hello! I'm transitioning from Photoshop (CS2) and loving Affinity Photo so far. But, I do a lot of portraits in front of green screens and am having some issues. My workflow in PS was to select the green screen with the select-color range tool and then mask or delete it. It had a sensitivity setting that worked flawlessly at getting just the green screen. But using the same method (select-sampled color) in Affinity Photo selects way too much of my subject including the hair& face. And the selection brush & flood select tool miss too much hair even when refining the selection. Is there some way to get the select sampled color tool to work like PS' select color range? It's really the only thing keeping me from totally leaving PS.

Thanks!

[Dan C]

Hi scottbaughman,

Welcome to the forums

Could you please provide a sample image so that I can look into the best workflow for you? Many thanks in advance!

[James Ritson]

8 hours ago, scottbaughman said:

Hello! I'm transitioning from Photoshop (CS2) and loving Affinity Photo so far. But, I do a lot of portraits in front of green screens and am having some issues. My workflow in PS was to select the green screen with the select-color range tool and then mask or delete it. It had a sensitivity setting that worked flawlessly at getting just the green screen. But using the same method (select-sampled color) in Affinity Photo selects way too much of my subject including the hair& face. And the selection brush & flood select tool miss too much hair even when refining the selection. Is there some way to get the select sampled color tool to work like PS' select color range? It's really the only thing keeping me from totally leaving PS.

Thanks!

Hi Scott, not an intentional plug but I wrote a procedural texture filter that acts as a green screen keyer—it's a lot quicker than creating manual selections and you can adjust the matte spill, antialiasing and fringing (green saturation). It's in my Workflow Bundle pack (https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/100491-jr-workflow-bundle-shortcuts-macros-hdr-tools-brushes/) but I've attached it to this post instead.

It'd be great to see if it works well for your imagery (I've only tested it on stock imagery with distinct green/blue backgrounds). Basically, you just run the macro on whichever layer (usually Background, the image layer) and then double click the Green Screen Key layer to access the controls.

I remember I did a quick tweet with a video clip that shows it in action as well: 

 

Hope that helps!

 

 

JR - Matting & Keying.afmacros

[scottbaughman]

5 hours ago, James Ritson said:

Hi Scott, not an intentional plug but I wrote a procedural texture filter that acts as a green screen keyer—it's a lot quicker than creating manual selections and you can adjust the matte spill, antialiasing and fringing (green saturation). It's in my Workflow Bundle pack (https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/100491-jr-workflow-bundle-shortcuts-macros-hdr-tools-brushes/) but I've attached it to this post instead.

It'd be great to see if it works well for your imagery (I've only tested it on stock imagery with distinct green/blue backgrounds). Basically, you just run the macro on whichever layer (usually Background, the image layer) and then double click the Green Screen Key layer to access the controls.

I remember I did a quick tweet with a video clip that shows it in action as well: 

 

Hope that helps!

 

 

JR - Matting & Keying.afmacros

Hello James, I dowloaded the zip. How do I install the tools into Affinity? 

[scottbaughman]

5 hours ago, Dan C said:

Hi scottbaughman,

Welcome to the forums

Could you please provide a sample image so that I can look into the best workflow for you? Many thanks in advance!

Hi Dan,

There seems to be some problem uploading files (-200 error). Any ideas? Right off, when compared to the green screen in James' post mine is much more subdued. I went to my local photography store, bought green chroma key paper and took that to Home Depot and had them match it. Regardless, the Photoshop Select Color range tool works flawlessly.

Scott

[scottbaughman]

6 hours ago, Dan C said:

Hi scottbaughman,

Welcome to the forums

Could you please provide a sample image so that I can look into the best workflow for you? Many thanks in advance!

Dan,

OK, I got the files to upload (made them smaller). The hair flip shot was impossible in AF but quick in PS CS2. The still requires lots of refining in AF but still misses some stray hair, but the color selection tool leaves the hair in PS. Thanks for your thoughts!

Scott

[v_kyr]

If you do a lot of such green screen background shootings, some chroma key supporting software might be useful to use additionally here in companion for quick and easy mask out of a bunch of images.

Like for example ...

• Cutout Pro (has quite good chroma key support)
• Topaz Mask-Ai
• Topaz Remask
• etc.

 

[scottbaughman]

3 hours ago, v_kyr said:

If you do a lot of such green screen background shootings, some chroma key supporting software might be useful to use additionally here in companion for quick and easy mask out of a bunch of images.

Like for example ...

• Cutout Pro (has quite good chroma key support)
• Topaz Mask-Ai
• Topaz Remask
• etc.

 

Thanks for the suggestion. I'd like to first see if I can do what is needed in Affinity. As a fall back I can continue to do this in my ancient CS2 install but that's not ideal. 

[Medical Officer Bones]

 With chroma keying a good (green) despill option is rather important. In PS CS2 a reasonable (automated) key can be achieved, but incomparable to a good dedicated Keying option.

Here's a quick three-minute key matte with Blender, which has a dedicated Keyer. The beauty of this approach is that, once you arrive at a good matte, the nodal setup allows you to slot in any other image from the same photoshoot without the need for changes. It is even possible to load all individual images as an image sequence, and treat them as a video sequence, spitting out all the keyed images for later use in Affinity.

Both mattes require much more attention (I am not happy with either matte, in particular the right one which is subpar), but with the rather low resolution and jpg compression of the originals I didn't see much sense in pursuing a better result and spending more time on this. Still, not too bad for a few minutes of work.

 

 

[Dan C]

On 11/27/2019 at 6:10 PM, scottbaughman said:

Hello James, I dowloaded the zip. How do I install the tools into Affinity? 

Once you've downloaded and extracted the ZIP you should find 3 folders, Brushes, Macros & Shortcuts. The Macro you require is 'Workflow Aids' and this can be imported into the Library Studio (View>Studio>Library), as outlined here - https://affinity.serif.com/tutorials/photo/desktop/video/309301203

Once imported, open the image, then the Library Studio and select the 'Green Screen Key' Macro. This will apply the key to your image, and can then be further adjusted by double clicking on the adjustment layer nested to your image in the Layers panel. Below is a screenshot of the result of the Macro -

I hope this helps!

[firstdefence]

Even with all of this work I think there are a few inherent issues with the photo.

The green screen isn't evenly lit, it has a vertical gradient from a darker green to a lighter green, also the corners are vignetted slightly, the edges of her hair appears to have a green cast, as if the green screen colour has been reflected onto her hair, so you aren't going to get a selection without green fringing, which as James macro highlights requires some form of toning down.

I have PS, Topaz Mask AI and Franzis CutOut and none of them initially get around the green cast/fringing without some post work.

PS is very simple and a fast track starting point.

Topaz Mask Ai can be very quick with the odd Auto button but can be temperamental and will sometimes crash, the auto button has this odd, what looks like a tooltip but is actually a single choice dropdown asking you to "Detect Objects" which make absolutely no sense to me at all.
Topaz Mask Ai 

CutOut is the best initial mask but the interface is not intuitive at all, with weird screen rotations to get to a particular tool like green screen masking and icons that make no sense visually.
Franzis CutOut, a single click via a sample colour dropper

Affinity Photo does a better job initially than Topaz Mask Ai with less green fringing but not as good as CutOut, but you need more clicks to get a reasonable mask, approx 7-10 clicks, and when compared to CutOut.

CutOut is the clear winner for initial result and minimum workflow, it's a shame the GUI lets it down.

[v_kyr]

Yes CutOut is very good in such things, and agreed that it's perspective wall like GUI (see also) is getting used to. Older CutOut versions didn't had/used such a sort of graphical user interface.