The Epoch of the Green Screen

Chroma Keying, the technique of removing the background from an image or video based on color hues, has been a tool in the repertoire of professional film makers and photographers for decades. But will that always be the case?

If you wandered through the streets of any populated city 20 years ago, chances are you would see some phone booths. At the time they were a convenient tool that enabled calling your friends from wherever you were. Yet when you see a phone booth today you can’t help but ask yourself: „Why?“. In todays world, there is just no need for them anymore (with some rare exceptions perhaps) and having bulky boxes just around any corner does not make a lot of sense if everyone carries the same technology in their pockets anyway.

The story might go similar with Green Screens: They require lots of space, good lighting conditions, fine-tuned camera and post-processing settings – and even then the results are sometimes far from perfect and require manual corrections. In the era of Artificial Intelligence, when you’re fixing the wrinkles of a green cloth for the 100th time, it might also be time to take a moment to ask yourself: „Why?“.

With remove.bg you can remove the background from any photo 100% automatically, be it green, blue, red, striped, curled, a landscape, a tourist attraction or a photo studio. No fiddling with camera settings, background materials, split lighting or manual work required. Just select an image, wait a few seconds, and you’re done.

Are you still using a green screen? Next time, instead of your chroma keying software, try uploading the image to remove.bg and compare the results. With todays improvements, green and blue screen images give even better results.

Protip: If you’re aiming for maximum quality, we recommend taking photos in front of a neutral background. A busy city also works, but it’s not much better than an high-contrast signal color hue that – if reflected on human skin – looks highly unnatural.

PS: If you’re wondering „What about video?“ – remove.bg does not currently support it. But just as the epoch of the green screen might be slowly coming to an end, the epoch of AI background removal has only just begun.

What do you think, is there a need for green screens and chroma keying in the future? Tell us!