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Hi! This is Pam. You have entered
a classroom on how to prepare a green screen
effect using Photoshop Elements. A green screen
effect is tons of fun! You can take the image of a person
and actually put that person into a different background.
So, especially for a classroom, it creates a lot of
creativity and fun. The first thing that I want to do
is go down and open up Adobe Photoshop
Elements. This is what the basic program
looks like. Now for the green screen, I want
to choose a picture of a person and a picture of a background.
I want to take the person and place them in
a background so I need two pictures open.
I will go up to FILE, OPEN.
I need to select my two pictures.
First of all, I have some pictures from Mozambique, Africa.
I took these while on safari.
I will go down and choose a safari picture. Here’s one. Good. Three rhinos!
There’s the three rhinos. They look like they are all ready
for a student in a classroom, don’t you think? So now I am going
to go up to FILE, OPEN
and I am going to find my student picture.
You can see that these are pictures that I have already taken
with my camera. I will choose this one.
Now, this is very important.
You’ll note that when I took a picture of the student, the background is very plain.
This is very, very important for the project.
We call this a green screen effect because it’s actually best
to have the student in front of a green screen. You can do this by
taking a green sheet and hanging it behind the student, or
using green bulletin board paper
and put that behind the student.
This time I didn’t have either of them, so I had the student stand
outside in front of a blank wall. What I want
to do is take this student and put him
into our rhino picture. So,
you’ll notice that over to the right hand side it says
background. I don’t want the student to be the background
of the picture. So, I will DOUBLE CLICK the word background
and it says up here new layer.
I want to create a layer using the student.
I will call this Layer student.
Now I will press OK.
The words changed over to the right to “Layer student.” Now I can work with my layer.
One thing I will do now is go over to the left hand side
of the screen and I will take the quick selection
tool. I will click it. You will
notice that my cursor moved from an arrow to a circle.
Now I will select
the background of the student
by just dragging my mouse around the outside edge of the student.
All the way around.
Up to the corner, back down.
Now, it selected all of the background. But, you will notice
it took out some things I want in the picture.
So I am going to go up to VIEW and ZOOM
in, VIEW, zoom in
There. Now I am pretty close. I will go back over to the left
I want to take the HAND tool.
I want to move my picture down
so that you can see what happened. You can see that the background
was very similar to the child’s hat. This
is what happens when you don’t use a green screen. But, we can still
fix that. So I am going to go back and take my
QUICK SELECT tool
and I am going to, this time,
change up at the top
the subtraction tool. I want to
subtract out the hat from the selection that we will get rid of.
So I will click that up here. Notice that
it’s now a circle with a minus sign.
I am going to take my mouse and I will
take out that little hat section, this top
hat section, this
side hat. I work very slowly to make sure that I am careful
to get everything but not over-do it. Now, he
has a little bit of his ears that got caught with the background. So
I will go very slow and try to
select his ears. There’s one ear,
there’s the other ear.
I also note that there’s a little bit of his bandana right here
that I need to fix.
I can go back up and take my HAND TOOL
and move my picture
and I can see that somehow his hand and his rifle didn’t
get in the picture, either. So I will go back
and take the QUICK SELECTION TOOL
and I will go very carefully up the hand
and the barrel of the rifle,
I need to make sure I get his finger here.
Notice I am going very slowly.
Sometimes if you go too fast on this, it will select
the whole picture and you will have to start all over. So I am
going to move back, grab my HAND tool,
slide my picture over,
go back, get my QUICK SELECTION tool,
and I want to choose this little portion.
You can see it’s selecting a little bit too much again.
Ha. That’s because I have part of the background here. So I
must go back up and change my selection
to the plus. Notice that we have a circle with a plus sign.
And I want to go ahead and add back in that small section
of background here. That looks pretty good!
I am going to go back and take my HAND tool,
slide the picture over, and I just want
to double check everything.
Checking the outside edges of the picture. That looks
pretty good! Now I will go back up to view
and zoom out,
OK. That looks like
that’s acceptable to me. Now I am going to take
and press my DELETE button on my keyboard.
It took the background out because that’s
the part that I selected! Now I
want to go back to the part I want to be the background
…the rhinos! So I will go to the bottom of the screen,
and double click the rhinos.
It brings that picture back up to the top. Now all I have to do
is take my quick selection tool,
sorry, my MOVE tool up at the top,
and I am going to take the student,
and drag the picture up
into this picture. You’ll notice it created a little fist.
Now, when I let go,
it places the student in the picture. He looks
awfully tiny! ha ha. I don’t think that’s going to work!
I can do anything with this picture. If I wanted
something silly, I could put him up on the rhino.
Or maybe back in the bushes, hiding. I think I want to
make him look like he is standing in front of the rhinos and
larger so that we can actually see him. I am going to resize the picture
Then I will move it where I want it
to be.
There.
You’ll notice that the picture is slightly blurry. That’s okay.
It will readjust after I click the okay button
So right down here we have a green check mark and it says to
“commit to the current operation.” That means, yes, I want
to place the picture here with this size. So I will
click the button and there you go.
You can see if I click off to the side, it places
the student in the picture. It looks like his picture was taken
in front of the rhinos. Think of all the possiblities.
You can have lots of fun.
It’s a great surprise to students. They love to see themselves in front of a
famous ballgame, or out on the range, or in
another country. Make sure at the end you go back up
and click FILE, SAVE AS
and give your photo a name
before you save it. I’m not going
to go ahead and save this picture.
That’s all you do. I hope you have tons of fun
creating the green screen effect in Photoshop Elements.