Any advice on color replacement/matting/chroma key?

Discussion in 'Photoshop' started by UMaineECE, Jul 10, 2006.

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  1. #1
    I'm currently working on a project in which I'm taking still images of various products against a static background. Up to this point, I've been manually cutting the products out of their background, a very tedious activity.

    Taking a step back, I realized that I have many thousands of photos to take and clean up, and that this manual manipulation just isn't going to "cut it" (pun, haha).

    I have been trying to find a program of sorts that will remove a particular color (preferably specified by its hex code) from a photo, and perhaps replace it with white, or resize/crop the image.

    With this program I would be able to take the pictures against an obnoxious background color that could be quickly done away with by a computer.

    I guess this is known by many terms in "the industry", including chroma key, matting, compositing, etc.

    I have run across a couple of possible programs (Ultimatte, Adobe After Effects), but I don't know much about any of them.

    One other feature that would be, well, desired would be command-line functionality. Ideally, I would be able to incorporate said program into a script that can process a huge list of photos while I'm off doing other things.

    Thanks for your help

    Andy
     
    UMaineECE, Jul 10, 2006 IP
  2. zeebloyankees

    zeebloyankees Guest

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    #2
    I use the Gimp and it does the job well, and its free

    This site might help you if you choose the Gimp

    http://gimp-savvy.com/<url>
     
    zeebloyankees, Jul 10, 2006 IP
  3. sketch

    sketch Well-Known Member

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    #3
    Gimp wouldn't help any since he's looking for a program that'll do batch jobs.

    While I've used Ultimatte and AE (for video), I don't know of any programs that'll do batch jobs, nor would I suggest one if there were. I guarantee you the problem you'll have if you try to do batch jobs of this sort is that some of the images will contain the color you want to remove IN the part you DON'T want to remove.

    Even when using programs like AE, you have to use manual masking methods BEFORE applying any chroma key settings. I hate to say it, but you're stuck doing it manually :p
     
    sketch, Jul 10, 2006 IP
  4. slickricky

    slickricky Active Member

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    #4
    Like they said, this is easy to do with video, so maybe you could download a program that converts your images to video, then cut the color, and then reconvert the video to images? Just an idea.
     
    slickricky, Jul 10, 2006 IP
  5. UMaineECE

    UMaineECE Peon

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    #5
    I actually have a good variety of background colors to use, and I feel that I will be able to find a working background for the majority of the products, severely reducing my workload.

    I downloaded a photoshop plug-in called cinematte but it only works with blue and green backgrounds, and won't work batches (at least not from the command line, which is necessary for my script).

    Another program I've been meaning to try is ImageMagick but unfortunately there are no compilers on the computers at work, and I can't seem to find a pre-compiled version.

    I appreciate the responses, and feel free to chime in again as I am still looking
     
    UMaineECE, Jul 11, 2006 IP