Green screen (or chroma key compositing, or chroma keying) is a post-production technique that allows you to easily remove image background based on color hues (also known as chroma range).

Long story short: if you shoot with a green background, it’s much easier to remove it afterward in post-processing. The after-effect you can do with photoshopping (or other techniques, depending on the format you’re working with) can go beyond the limits of your imagination. 

Green screen removal is a technique extensively used in photography, movies, and videogames. If you ever wondered how SF movies are made or how people can safely get into impossible life-threatening locations, the green screen is your answer. 

Happily, the green screen technique is not necessary anymore for day-to-day photography, mainly because it requires perfect lighting, a lot of space for background materials, so on and so forth. 

You can get your work done with more advanced machine-learning technologies that make background removal for a transparent image result much more straightforward. Pixelpro.ai is one of them and now you can try for free. 

But still, if you do have to use a green screen for background removal, here are five newbie mistakes that you can avoid:

1. Shadows and an unevenly lit green screen

Shadows can make your life miserable in image editing and green screen removal. The dark areas of the green screen make it almost impossible to key out your subject fully.

Shadows often appear when your subject is too close to the background fabric or your lightning is powerful. You can fix this by placing your subject further from the green background and avoid using a single light source.

Unevenly lit green screens also make the chroma key process very complicated because of the dark and light areas in the background.

2. Too much lighting

As opposite to uneven lights, you can also have too much light on the green screen. This creates green edges that can appear around your subject.

If your subject is a person, this might give them a green reflection on the skin, which is very unappealing and also a pain in image post-production.

This is just another argument to use a plain white background and an image background removal tool.

3. Damaged green screen background

Whether you are using fabric or green walls, make sure that the background isn’t torn, wrinkled, or stained. Any damage on the green screen can create shadows, which brings us back to point 1 in this article. 

Make sure you have a steamer or an iron around to get your fabric vertical or get the painting redone before your shooting day.

4. Disappearing green objects

When shooting with a green background, your subject shouldn’t wear any green clothes, makeup, or accessories because otherwise, you will end up disappearing after image editing.

Chroma keying means eliminating all green hues from images or footage. If you need the green object or your brand uses a lot of green, we recommend switching to a blue screen or a plain white background.

5. Shutter speed motion blur

If your shutter speed is slow, you might end up getting some blur in front of the green screen. 

This is also something hard to fix in post-production, because the blurred areas get mixed with the background image, making it sometimes impossible to have a clean chroma key without losing some parts of the image after the green screen removal.

Are you trying to get a transparent image and the photoshopping is killing you? Check out Pixelpro.ai to get and access a green screen removal tool that will bring down your image editing efforts from hours to only a few seconds.