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I'm working on a plant store website. Usually, for product photos, we use a green screen background so that we can remove the background and use any background we want for the product. But for plants, I'm guessing this isn't an option, because we won't be able to remove the colour green without affecting the plant itself.

Therefore what colour would you recommend to use for the screen background of the photos, so that it can later be easily removed?

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  • probably any color that doesn't have much green in it. You could try bluescreen since they are commonly available – Jonas Apr 28 '20 at 18:42
  • Check this out; en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complementary_colors maybe it can help! – s.k Apr 28 '20 at 18:53
  • Plants can be of any color (flowers...) but there is always some color, so a neutral gray could be your best bet. Yes, there are white petals, bit these can also be distinguished from gray. – xenoid Apr 28 '20 at 21:18
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A green or blue background is mostly used on video or cinema to be replaced by another background because you need to "automate" the process when you have hundreds or thousands of frames.

But in photography, it is not always the case.

If you have time to plan, the color you choose depends on the finished product. It would depend if the finished look is high key or low key, if the product has some rim light, if you will keep the projected shadows, etc.

In my opinion, just use the color that will most likely fit the finished look.

Because you want the least color contamination possible this reduces to white, gray, or black, but in the case of black you need it to be darker than the shadows, so you have a clean border.

Depending on the project, a photo can be extracted with something simple as a magick wand selection or using some kind of blending mode. But you need to light the background as evenly lighted as possible.

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If I have to make that background extraction job I would be so thankful if the background color is the opposite/complementary of green: magenta or pink. Having this color as a background, in an RGB image, the blue channel has the job already done.

The complementary color to the dominant one in a picture is always the optimal for backgrounds to be masked.

enter image description here Original image from www.ponderingpot.com.au

enter image description here Blue channel from the RGB image

enter image description here Selection mask obtained after duplicating the blue channel, inverting it and adjusting levels

enter image description here

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