The company I'm with is getting into digital photography for the first time. They want to be able to shoot pictures of people, then quickly load them into a computer, and manipulate the photo so that subject is standing there w/ exsisting artwork (a celebrity). We're all new to digital photography, and we're wondering several things.

First, since time is of the essence with what we're doing, what would be the fastest way to accomplish this? Would shooting the subject in front of a green screen be the answer? Or is that not necessary? We want to run the photo into Photoshop, then go from there.

Thanks for your time. Any help would be much appreciated!

-- Radio Guy (userflynn@hotmail.com), December 21, 1998

Answers

Green/Bluescreen is probably best. There are several programs for doing really powerful masking to separate subject/background. By far the best I've seen is KnockOut, from Ultimatte Technologies. (I think they're in Chatsworth, CA, in the LA area, 818 area code.) Don't know if KnockOut works on PC as well as Mac though, I've only got the Mac version. Extensis (Portland or Seattle I think) makes an excellent masking tool too. Both of these programs run independently of Photoshop though, so you'll need to re-open the images in Photoshop to work further with them.

Any other auto-masking experience out there?

-- Dave Etchells (web@imaging-resource.com), December 26, 1998.