I needed to replace the green screen background of an image with the background of a sky using Adobe Photoshop.

I was given the two following assets to work with:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I will use the photo of the woman in front of the green screen as my main photo where I will replace the green areas of it with the picture of the sky.

After importing both my images into Photoshop, I began by dragging the image of the woman onto the image of the sky so I have a layer for each in the same window.

Next, I selected my color range for my green screen image by using the eye dropper tool to select a very close green part near the woman. I also used my adding eye dropper tool to add other parts of the green that were close to the woman. This created a solid mask around the green green area in my image.

However, I wanted to mask the woman and not the green areas, so I simply clicked inverse so that the mask was around the woman. I knew it was around the woman because my color white was set to solid and black was transparent, meaning the white area in my color range would be where my mask was going to be.

This enabled the software to know where to mask the green screen based on where the colors I selected. All in all, the software now knew how to separate the woman from the green screen making a mask layer of the woman.

The green screen was still overlapping the image of the sky, to change that, with my previously masked layer selected I navigated to the layer menu followed by the layer mask sub-menu and clicked on reveal  selection.

That wayPhotoshop would make the sky overlap the green screen and not the woman because her mask acted as a boarder for the image of the sky not to overlap.

Unfortunately, I noticed a green outline around the woman which was what remained of the overlapped green screen.

To tackle this issue, I reselected the mask I had made for the woman earlier and navigated to the adjustments menu so I can add a hue and saturation layer for the mask. This is so that the remaining green’s saturation could be decreased.

I accomplished this by changing the master color control to only the cyan (the green screen in the photo was dominantly cyan colored) so that I only remove the cyan areas of the woman’s mask so I do not affect the color of the woman’s skin or hair.

After that, all I did was adjust the saturation by using the slider button.

I was still unsatisfied with the visibility of the green outline around the woman. I countered the outline by clicking on the “Select” menu opening up a list of other menus which I picked “Modify”.

In the Modify sub menu I clicked once on “Contract”  selecting to contract by 2 pixels (unit for the image size) and once on “Feather  selecting to feather by 3 pixels (unit for the image size).

Now the green outline seemed even more subtle on the woman’s mask.

To refine the usage of those two features I went to the Select menu and clicked on inverse again on the mask so that everything outside the mask would be selected instead.

I proceeded by duplicating the selected area of the sky.

I turned down the opacity of the duplicated sky layer so that it can blend in with my original sky layer. The blend’s visual’s would overlap what little remained of the green screen.

To finish this off, the green screen was showing through my sky texture due to the image of the sky being pasted over it which meant that the creases in the green screen would appear on the sky image.

To fix this, I used the “Brush Tool” and its “Hard Round Brush” with the color selection of black because as I said earlier my black color was transparent. Which meant that it could paint the sky image’s texture onto of the creases in the green screen.

Brush Tool process video.mp4

This is my finished product with my Photoshop file’s history: