The theory behind shooting portraits on a green-screen background is a good one: Give yourself a solid color that’s easy to select. The problem has always been that it isn’t easy to automate extracting subjects from the background—until now. Here’s a method to create a Photoshop action to extract your subjects and place them in a new background. 1 PREPARATION IS EVERYTHING Your chances of success in a project like this will depend on the work you do up front. You need good, consistent lighting of the green screen, some distance between your subjects and the background to avoid shadows, and all the portraits should be framed in a similar way. Also, keep your graphic elements in a specific folder. For our example we’re going to use a series of “karate kids.” 2 CREATE A LAYERED BACKGROUND DOCUMENT We’re going to automate the steps of putting these kids onto trading cards, so first we have to create the graphic elements for the card. Create a new file (File> New) for your trading card that matches the size and resolution of your green-screen images.

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