Chromakey backgrounds

[HVF]

I'm trying to find out if Corel Paintshop X4 Pro has a tool or setting to remove a chromakey green screen background? I have looked at Corel's help (was no help), and googled but couldn't seem to find an answer. If not, is there a plugin or ? ? ?

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks!

[LeviFiction]

I don't know of any plugins specifically for PSP. But if you look for Photoshop plugins one of them might work for you.

There is no specific "Green Screen" or "Chormakey" function inside of PSP. There are, however, many techniques for removing a specific color from the background to bring out the foreground object or person.

1) Background Eraser tool: This tool intelligently examines the current sample area under the brush (represented by the crosshairs in the middle) and removes only the colors that match, in most cases properly finding edges and such leaving only the foreground object.

2) Object Extractor - This came with X3 and is present in x4 and X5. This simple tool lets you outline the areas you want to keep and delete the rest. X2 Ultimate came with a plugin that did the job a little better in my opinion called the Background Remover plugin from ImageSkill.

3) Color Range selector, not as fancy as Photoshop's but if you're only looking to remove 1 color it's very easy to use. First hit Ctrl + A to select the whole image. Then go to the selections menu, under Modify you'll find the Color Range selector which will let you either add to the current selection or remove a color from the current selection. Go ahead and select the color you want to remove, adjust the softness and tolerance, until you get a good selection. You can then invert the selection to delete colored background leaving only the foreground.

4) Magic Wand tool, this will let you select any color in the image and all colored pixels that match within a given tolerance. If you turn "contiguous" off it will select that color throughout the whole image.

Only down side to these, no overspill correction. You'll have to fix that manually.

[photodrawken]

In addition to the tools mentioned by LeviFiction, you can also use Image...Split Channel...Split to CMYK.
1. Use the yellow channel, and adjust the Levels to get a bright subject against a black background.
2. Then use the Magic Wand with a tolerance of 4 or less and set to "Contiguous" to select that black background, then copy it and paste it in as a new layer in your original image.
3. Paint and erase that new layer to refine the edge.
4. Use the Magic Wand set to "Opacity" mode to select the subject area of that new layer.
5. Create a Mask layer from that selection.

Here's the original image:

Uploaded with ImageShack.us

Here's the modified yellow channel:

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And the final result:

Uploaded with ImageShack.us

There's no single method that will work best for all images -- you'll have to find the one that works for your specific image.

[HVF]

Thanks for the input. Looks like Paintshop Pro is not the right tool for Chromakey. After doing a little research I'm considering a product called Photokey 5. Still need to do more research, but want something that is not overly difficult or time consuming to work with, and when finished will yield a good result.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Thanks.