Upde Designs

Nikon D700 | Nikon 24 - 70 mm lens | Strobe lights | ISO 200 1/125 sec @ f8.0

Pearl Harbor Day.  70 years ago what a day in infamy.  A huge debt of gratitude to our Greatest Generation.

Yesterday a really good thing happened to me.  It didn’t start all that well but it sure ended well.  You will remember my post two days ago about my love / hate relationship with Green Screen photography.  Well now I’m back to love.

Last year trying to process the green screen images took forever.  Converting the green screen or “Keying” the green out was not hard.  I have a wonderful program hat does  that.  The problem was that the program tended to “Mute” the colors so I would have to go back into Photoshop and try to recover the skin tones as well as all the other colors.  It took forever.  Not only that but it was very hard to always get the colors and tones exactly right.

I worked on an image for almost two hours Tuesday morning (which is why there was no blog on Tuesday.)  At the end of that time I still didn’t have a useable image.  I was very frustrated and demoralized.

I knew it had to be something that I was doing wrong because I had watched the tutorials on the program and they never had that problem and they worked with some really crappy images.   Finally just before leaving for work yesterday I sent an e-mail to the company who makes the software (which is in England)  and enclosed one of my image files.  I didn’t expect to hear from them for a couple of days but to my surprise when I got back from lunch I had a response.

Now I’ve taken on-line lessons on Photoshop and Lightroom for over three years and all the instructors always recommend that you select the “Pro Photo” color palette in PS and LR because it has a larger range of colors than the Adobe RGB color palette.

Seems the program I use for green screen require Adobe RGB color palette (doesn’t say that anywhere but it does) and so what was happening was that it was trying to match two separate color palettes and couldn’t so it would  “approximate” the colors.  I reset my color palette to Adobe RGB and the problem was solved.  Yea!

Now I can make my deadline of getting all those portraits processed before Christmas.  The group of guys above are loan officers from our Clinton Bank.  They were the valet parking attendants and beverage servers for the Christmas Gala.

Great group of guys and great friends of mine.  Thanks for stopping by.  Enjoy your day and be careful.