Digital Anarchy Primatte Chromakey PS 3.5.1

Primatte Chromakey 3.51 is a powerful chromakey compositing plugin for Photoshop. Primatte takes a foreground image of any resolution, shot against a single color, and replaces that color with transparent pixels.
Essentially, you create a very complex soft-edged mask. Primatte is commonly used in motion picture and television post-production for the creation of special effects. Increasingly, chromakeying has become indispensable in graphic design and still photography.
Why Use Primatte?
What are the uses of Primatte? Unlimited. Use blue screening for sophisticated catalog shots. Add existing backgrounds to Little League photos. Surround an elementary school grade with the Star Trek Enterprise, or place a bride before a beautiful 3D-rendered landscape.
When should you invest in Primatte? If your current compositing method is removing and replacing backgrounds by hand with Photoshop tools. If the quality of your chromakey shots are less than ideal, or your shooting conditions were poor. If you’re getting blue-spill or hard edges on your composites. Even if you simply want to explore the creative and practical possibilities of chromakeying, Primatte is the purchase for you.

The process that Primatte performs is called ‘chromakeying’. This is also called ‘bluescreening’ or ‘greenscreening’, depending upon the color of the background you’ve placed behind your model. A term you’ll hear in motion graphics is ‘traveling matte’. And the word ‘mask’, a term used throughout Photoshop, is another way of explaining the way that Primatte selects and deletes pixels.
Chromakeying is used to insert a false background, such as a weather map or scenic view, behind the principal subject being photographed. The principal subject is photographed against a background of a single color or a relatively narrow range of colors, usually blue or green. Then, that solid color is digitally extracted.
When you watch a movie or look at a photograph that has an unreal mix of images, you are usually looking at the illusion of bluescreen.

Chromakey Without Primatte
How do you create a chromakey without Primatte? Very… slowly… heh. To set up a bluescreen shot, you’ll want to film or photograph in front of a substrate of a solid color.
When you load up the image in Photoshop, you’ll want to wipe out anything but the color. The Magic Wand, which selects areas by tonal value, is a good first shot. Set different Tolerance levels to experiment with how much color you can initially capture. To fine-tune, you may want to apply a Quick Mask to the selected blue area. Paint in the subtleties of the selection with a Photoshop Brush and Eraser.
Finally you will replace the section that has been wiped with a background. Drag the background graphic behind the bluescreened image and release to create a new layer. Move the new layer behind the masked layer and position it. You’re done your bluescreen.
Primatte Chromakey is easy and quite intuitive to use… once you know its tools. If you don’t understand the tools, then you may be confused about how Primatte operates. Please invest some time in the tutorials.

The following are notable features in Primatte Chromakey 3:
● Batch Processing
● AutoMask: which removes the background automatically in one click.
● Light Wrap: New control panel gives better spill suppression and a more convincing blend of the foreground and background.
● A variety of tools and preview modes are available

Photoshop CS5 Only