How to Apply Photoshop to a Blue Screen Image

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There are a NUMBER of different ways to use blue screen and photoshop together. The default way to use blue screen in Photoshop is to extract either the blue "chroma key" information from your image to apply your remaining image to another picture. In this tutorial, I will be extracting the blue screen background from my image via Photoshop.

1. First, bring your image into Photoshop:
   
   Open your image in Photoshop. Your image can be of any type, from JPEG, GIF or any other type of image that Photoshop can support.
   



2. Copy your image to the clipboard in Photoshop (for Windows, click Ctrl + A to Select All, then on the menu select Edit -> Copy).
   



3. 
   
   Create a new document with the same dimensions (length/width) as your image. If you followed the step above and copied your image already, since you copied your image to the clipboard, you will not have to type in the specific dimensions for your image, because Photoshop automagically does this for you! Select "Transparent" for the Background, unless you want a solid color background in the back of your image. Click OK.
   
   
   
   
   
   



4. Now you should have a transparent background Photoshop file ready for your work. Create a New Layer by Selecting Layer -> New -> Layer, or press Ctrl+Shift+N if you have a PC as a shortcut.
   



5. Copy/paste your image into Photoshop by selecting Edit -> Paste, or Ctrl + v if you have a PC. Below is the image I am using for the example. Click on the thumbnail for a larger image.
   
   
   
   
   

Now you're all ready Set to start using Photoshop editing tools on your image. One of the easiest tools to use to extract image information is the Magic Wand Tool. The Magic Wand tool allows you to select an area of an image based on its color. We'll be using this tool extensively in this tutorial.

Click anywhere within the blue area of the image. The Magic Wand Tool will select an area of the image that has blue color. Note that the tool doesn't select ALL of the blue. The more even your lighting is when you take the blue screen shot, the easier it is to extract the blue screen using this method. The Magic Wand selections depend on the Tolerance property that you can specify at the top of the Photoshop workspace. You can adjust it to your liking. In my case I made the Tolerance level 15, and adjusted it to a level of 30 as needed throughout my use of the Magic Wand tool.





After you select a blue screen area on your image with the Magic Wand Tool, select Edit -> Cut (or Ctrl + X for PC Users) to cut away the blue from your image. You should now see the transparent background where the blue used to be. Continue to do this to all the blue chunks within your image, and soon you'll have your image free from the blue screen!

The Magic Wand Tool is a wonderful tool, but it doesn't solve all image blue screen extraction. Sometimes the blue screen picture will leave blue remnants even after you use this tool. As I said before, nice equal lighting helps a lot when you are working with a blue screen, so the tool can pick up more color when you do the selections.

In my picture above with the ending result, my blue screen lighting wasn't highly optimal so I had to apply more detailed tweaking to get the blue out of my picture. Luckily Photoshop has nifty tools to make the job easier!

If the tool doesn't pick up all the blue then you will have to do some additional fixes. One way is to select the pixels one section at a time using the Marquee or Eraser Tools. It may be possibly tedious to do it this way, but it works. You can also try applying the Smooth or Contract tools to your image by selecting your chosen image and selecting these tools under the Select -> Modify menu.

At this point, the sky's the limit to what you can do with your newly extracted image! You can simply put another colored background behind it, or incorporate another breathtaking set of images as well in the existing image. You can also take your newly extracted image and apply it to some other image or program. In my image example below, I used a few internet images I found on the net, used Photoshop fonts / borders, and did some additional tweaks to put everything together for the overall scene. With Photoshop the possibilities are endless!





Also, check out my links below for additional tweaking tips for your image. Thanks for reading, and have fun!