I need to change green to… something else

[Walter Biscardi]

Lesson learned here, always shoot and light for green screen so you can change the color in the background at the whims of your client. This is a pretty normal thing to have happen after the shoot quite honestly, which is why we always shoot in front of white or green screen for changeable backgrounds.

For this situation, you want to brighten the heck out the scene and add a lot of saturation so you can essentially make a fake green screen. Just brighten it way up so you can pull a key from the screen.

Now use that key over your original scene so you can color correct your main subject in front of your key.

Now replace the keyed out green with whatever color the client wants.

You won’t be able to change the color well in one pass, so do this in two passes. Once for the key so you can change the color and the other for the foreground.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media

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[Corbin Gross]

Great idea. So basically I’ll CC the footage for keying, just like I’d CC for any other color/lighting issue.

I’ll give that a shoot.

Thanks!

Corbin Gross | SANMAR
Photographer/Videographer | Marketing
22833 SE Black Nugget Road | Issaquah, WA 98029
206.727.5501 x5237
http://www.sanmar.com

[Jon Doughtie]

Another approach I have used with success is Super Tight Junk Mattes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UdeEEppEIA

Even if you do not use it for this, it is a good one to “tuck in your toolbelt”.

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[Paul Neumann]

I would suggest you take the shots into SpeedGrade to brighten the green. Very quick ways in there to get a keyable background. Plus you might be surprised at what you can come with just with color change.

[Jim Mcadory]

I know this is the Premier forum but I just finished an After Effects project that had a lot of badly lit greenscreen shots. A few shots had shadows so deep the area was more of a black-green color. This is what I used to recover all of these ( I am showing all of the steps so it looks like a long process, it is not as this can be done very quickly ).

Selective Color:

On the clip apply the “Selective Color” effect. With the effect, set the “Colors” control to “green”. Move the cyan to 100, move the magenta to –100, move the yellow and black to 100. Note the yellow and black sometimes work better with a lesser value. This will level out the green quite a bit if not completely.

KeyLight:

Apply the “Keylight” effect. With the Color dropper tool select a color closest to a person in the shot and that closely represents the average green (not the brightest and not the darkest) and click. This should give you a pretty good key to start with.

For the next few steps I like to switch the “View” control from “Final Result” to “Screen Matte”. This changes the display to black and white where black will be transparent, white will be opaque and grey is in between. The next few steps are to change the grey areas to either black or white.

Twirl down the “Screen Matte” options. Start with increasing the “Clip White” values which will quickly reduce/remove the grey areas. Watch detail areas like hair closely as this can clip them as well. If you still have grey then try bringing the “Clip Black” down.

The “Screen Shrink/grow” and “Screen softness” can be used to fine tune the key. These controls are especially helpful if you have a small amount of green fringe showing on the people.

Finally if there are still black/grey spots showing in areas that should be fully opaque (white areas) use the “Despot Black” to change black to white. I have not used “Despot White” very much but it changes white to black.

Reset the “View” to “Final Result”.

Create a new solid layer and set it’s color as desired. Move below the original clip.

Hope this helps.