From the course: Green Screen Techniques for Video and Photography

What makes a good background?

From the course: Green Screen Techniques for Video and Photography

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What makes a good background?

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- So what makes a good background plate when it comes to green screen? Well, this is very subjective, but there's a lot of things to think about. Let me show a few pictures, and I'll point out a couple of things that really stand out. In this image, what I like is that the image is not cluttered. Plus we have a sense of perspective here. But it is shot from from the eye level, so it feels natural. This next one here also works quite nicely because we have an interesting backdrop. Sometimes when shooting the same location, I'll think through what I need in order to pull it off. So I'll look and make sure that I actually capture information from different angles, and sometimes in camera will de-focus just a little bit to make it a bit more believable. In this case, while shooting a little bit shallower, it makes it more of a nice composite and it feels more like an actual backdrop. Sometimes I'll even get the depth of field right in the camera. I'll have my subject step into the frame, set the camera to a shallow depth of field and set focus on the subject. Then, lock the focus and have the subject step out, this way the backdrops are pre-blurred. That's what I did here, you'll notice that some of the key elements are already out of focus, and it looks more like a backdrop ready for use. Other times you'll end up repurposing things, so in this case we have a tremendous amount of depth. This image was shot at F4 so it doesn't have extreme depth of field, but it's a bit more in focus in detail than I would like, but what does work well here, is we have a sense of perspective, and as you'll learn later, it's easy to tweak this a bit, taking advantage of other tools. For example, we can use our transform tool here, which makes it simple to draw some straight lines. So I can define that these should be vertical here, and you see it starts to align, or that this should be the base, and you see it starts to tweak. So there's a lot you could do within post production to correct but in any case, trying to get a good balanced image ahead of time with a sense of perspective works well. Other times it's a bit difficult, and you have some clutter, but this is an image that we could think about during post production. Now the biggest thing that I'm going for when I'm shooting these images is to make sure that not too much is happening in the background. A lot of times when you're composing a photograph, it's difficult to think about what's going on behind the person, but you need to apply that judgment here, so don't worry about the perfect frame with lots of detail, go simpler, just like you would think about it if the person was standing in, look for distractions or objects that might intersect with their head or be problematic. Go for simple, go for reduced amount of subject matter and you'll have a very solid background that works great for green screen.

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