How much PP effort for green screening

Hi All,

I going to be taking portraits photos for church thanksgiving dinner, and I was wondering how much PP effort is involved for green screening a background (like American Gothic or something equally cheesy) I've done portraiture in the past so I'm familiar with this type of lighting. I'm hoping that if things are set up properly, the PP effort would most be "push button". I appreciate any input on this. Thanks.

There's some software that you can buy that will make it one-click - assuming your subjects and your green-screen are properly arranged and lit. If you don't light the subjects and background properly, then it'll be very difficult to recover it in post, even with the best software. I don't have any specific software to recommend.

The green screen must be clean, wrinkle-free, and evenly lit.
There must be enough distance from the subject to the green screen, so that the green does not reflect a color cast back onto the subject: 6 to 8 feet will be the barest minimum.
The subject must be properly lit, almost certainly requiring separate lights from the background.

Ideally, to make it believable, you'll study the drop-in background before setting up, and arrange your subject lights so that they'll mimic the lighting on your intended drop-in background: direction, size, intensity, color. If you have a neutral white three-point portrait light on your subject, and your drop-in background is a golden sunset beach, then the final composite will look fake. (note, if you're just doing this for fun/silly snapshots, and you don't care about making a "believable" composite, this isn't as important)

If you're doing it manually, a light gray background (such as white seamless paper without a background light) is almost certainly going to be easier and cleaner than a green background. There's no one-click method, though. Green and blue screens are more suited to video work.

Frizzy/flowing hair and sheer fabrics are the toughest subjects to mask. If all your subjects are bald and naked, manual masking is pretty easy.

Feet are the toughest part of a person to composite into a background, due to the perspective and shadows. Stick to half- or 3/4-length shots for easier compositing.

Great advice given above. It's not difficult to do in PS and it's almost a "1 click operation". Just select your color (sample your green screen color), invert selection, refine edge and make it a new layer with mask. From there, simply drop in any background you choose. That said, to make it easy, you must get the lighting absolutely right. The green screen must be very evenly lit and your subjects can not cast shadows on it (this almost always requires lighting the background separately to prevent shadows and gradients)....also, keep your subjects at least 5-6 feet away from the background to prevent the green light reflecting from your background being visible on your subjects. Backlighting your subjects (especially the head/hair area) will help tremendously in isolating details and getting good hair selection.

Thanks guys for the info. I didn't do this just yet for this past weekend (Thanksgiving dinner photoshoot) but this is something I'm aiming to do.

Regarding backdrop would a green or gray backdrop be better? (If gray could be used, I could use this besides "green screening" a backdrop in.)

For still photos, gray can be easier if you're working in a small space or don't have a lot of lighting gear - most notably, so you don't have to worry about the green giving a color cast or reflection onto the subjects. This isn't an excuse for a lazy lighting setup, it's just one less variable to worry about.

For video, it's assumed that the software is going it for you, and the software generally expects green or blue.

"Better" is a matter of preference and skill level. My results using a green screen for stills weren't up to my usual standards, but I've used it for video and it looked just fine (of course, that was with my wife doing the video editing, and she's got two decades of experience).