GSW Files

In the past when Green Screen Wizard saved an image it saved only the image itself. Now when JPG files are saved, information is added to the JPEG that specifies all the settings that made up the image. The name of the foreground and background used, the slider and checkbox settings, text content and placement, and all overlays are recorded. When you open a GSW file it will load all the settings and files that made up the original photo (this assumes that the files are still located where they were when you created the GSW file). GSW files are created automatically when you save a jpg file. This gives you the ability to create complicated templates. Now you can load a template, then load a new foreground and you’re done!

Here we load the “Beach Bash” jpg file.

Note how the text, the background, and the original green screen image are loaded. Also note that the Reset Foreground OnLoad has been unchecked. This will let us load a new foreground and keep all of the current settings.

So let's select a new foreground.

The new foreground now has the background and the text from the template file.

Pick Background from Gallery Button

With green screen photography there are always many backgrounds to choose from.  Selecting them one at a time to show a client can be a time consuming process.  The new gallery feature allows you to place a number of your favored backgrounds into a Gallery folder.  When the Pick button is clicked, the foreground that is currently on display is merged with all of the backgrounds in the Gallery folder.  The Galley Dialog then displays all your choices. If you click the select button by one of the choices then that background will become the current background.

There are two Gallery folders: GalleryBackgrounds and GalleryGSWFiles. Most users will simply add backgrounds to the GalleryBackgrounds folder. Advanced uses can save GSWFiles into the GalleryGSWFiles. If this is done then not only is the background replaced, but all settings for that GSW file are set as well.

The Gallery Folder

The Pick Background from Gallery Button is located next to the Load Background button in the Pro Version.

After the Pick button has been pushed the Last File Processed dialog box will appear that will show the foreground image with the next background as they are individually processed.  When the processing is complete an HTML page will be displayed that will show all of the images simultaneously. You simply select the image that you like and it will be brought into Green Screen Wizard Pro.

This dialog shows the foreground image being merged with a background:

This shows the gallery selection page. Clicking the Select button will load that background into Green Screen Wizard Pro.

Printing

Green Screen Wizard has an integrated printing capability. Simply clicking the print button on the main screen will bring up the print selection dialog.

Here is the print selection dialog:

You many select a different size and layout using the image size and layout dialog.

By clicking on any of the images you can replace it with the image of your choice.

Color Dialog

The Color Dialog lets you alter the hue of a photo. This can correct a photo that was not taken with the right color settings. or it can be use to match the background better as shown below.

Scaling Dialog

The Scaling Dialog can move and scale the foreground and background independently. The colored box indicates the size of the image when scaled or moved.

Rotation Dialog

The Rotation Dialog can place images in their proper orientation. It can also perform minor adjustments to a photo's alignment. The flip feature can cause the foreground or background features to appear on the left or the right.

EZ Combine Dialog

Green Screen Wizard 4.0 introduces the EZ Combine Dialog. While the slider interface will always give the best results, it takes some time to master the interactions of the sliders. To help occasional users and to save pro users' time, Green Screen Wizard designed a set of radio buttons and check boxes that makes the combine process very easy. If you have a well-exposed background with few shadows on it, then simply selecting the hair color and telling the system there are no shadows will improve most images.

Because Green Screen Wizard does not know if there are shadows on the screen or if there is black hair it needs some user input to determine to create the best output. The defaults will remove a bit more hair but usually give a clear background.

Clicking on “Show Detailed Settings” will show the slider style interface for users that want detailed control on how images are combined.

Label Dialog

It is often desirable to put simple text onto a photo.  It may be the date of the photo or a title for the photo, or perhaps simply the name of the photographer.  While Green Screen Wizard Pro provides a very full featured annotation capability, it was felt that a simple text capability should be provided for Green Screen Wizard Full and Lite users. It was further felt that the simplicity of this dialog would be of use even to pro users.  The dialog allows you to put two strings of text onto the photo.  The first string, called the title, is usually larger and placed at the top of the photograph.  The second string, called the note, is normally placed at the bottom and in a smaller font.  The dialog box allows you to place text in nine positions: there’s top, center and the bottom, and there is left, center and right.  For example if you want a text in the upper left hand corner you would specify top left.  If you want it to be in the bottom center you would specify bottom center.  The dialog box also allows you to set the color to black or white and to pick a font and a size.

This is what the dialog box looks like:

Overlays Dialog

In order to understand some of the Overlay features of Green Screen Wizard Pro 4.0 it is important to understand the concept of layers.  Think of images pasted on clear plastic sheets.  For example, imagine one plastic sheet simply has the word "hello" stenciled onto it, and a second sheet has just the image of a person on it.  The final sheet has a background on it.  You could take the sheet that has the person pasted on it and move it around the background. This is what Green Screen wizard has always done.  If you took the sheet that has the word "hello" on it and put it above the picture of the person, then the word hello would cover up the person and the background.  If you rearrange the sheets and put the person first, the text second and the background third, you’d see that now the person is covering the text and text is still covering the background. In computer terms these sheet are called layers. In the original version of Green Screen Wizard you had a foreground image and a background layer.  You can think of the background image as the bottom layer and the foreground image as a layer on top of it.  In Green Screen Wizard Pro there are five layers:

We have the Frame Overlay layer, the Foreground Overlay layer, the Foreground layer, the Background Overlay layer, and the Background layer.  Each layer will hide parts of the layers below it.  Layers are of course used by the overlay system, but they’re also use by the annotations system.  The annotations system will let you put text on any layer.  By default text goes on the frame layer which is the highest layer, meaning that the text will cover anything that is shown.  It is possible to put text on the lower layers so that the person may obscure the parts of the text.  The same is true with images. Images can be randomly placed above or behind the foreground layer. This gives the user a tremendous amount of flexibility and creative control.  It is a somewhat difficult concept a master, but once you master layers you will appreciate the flexibility they bring.

As was previously explained, Green Screen Wizard Pro 4.0 has five layers.  The Foreground layer and the Background layer are loaded using the buttons on the main Dialog.  To load an overlay, simply click on the load button and select the overlay that you’d like.  The overlay will be stretched to fit whatever image size you have.  Overlays are presented in both wide and tall formats in some cases. 

A new concept in Green Screen Wizard Pro 4.0 is the sandwich overlay.  In this type of overlay there’s a Foreground overlay that has a matching Background overlay.  This has the effect of making the foreground image appear to be sandwiched between the two overlays.  In some cases the Background overlay completely covers the background. In other cases it just provides an interesting context for the foreground image.  In the Full Version of Green Screen Wizard we allow a single overlay so that people can take advantage of our new magazine cover collection and frame collection.  In Green Screen Wizard Pro, magazine covers can be done more correctly. Consider these two covers:

In the Rolling Stone cover Bono is under the Rolling Stone Logo. This can be done with a simple overlay. In the Sports Illustrated cover Maria is “sandwiched” between the cover text and the Sports Illustrated title. This would be done in Green Screen Wizard Pro by having a Foreground overlay with the border and the text and a Background overlay that had the title on it.  As a convenience, if a Foreground overlay starts with “Foreground_” then the system will look for a Background overlay that has the same name but starts with “Background_” . For example the overlay file “Forground_RollingStone.png” would also load “Background_RollingStone.png” if “Background_RollingStone.png” exists.

This shows the Overlay Dialog for Green Screen Wizard Pro. The dialog is the same for the Lite and Full Versions but they only have the Foreground Overlay.

Clicking the load button on the frame overlay panel will bring up the dialog box as shown.

Selecting the gold frame will cause the frame to be drawn over the foreground image and the background.  You can shift and scale the image to fit the frame. This is a simple but very effective technique.

Select a foreground overlay by hitting the load button in the foreground overlay section. Let’s first load a simple magazine overlay intended for Green Screen Wizard Full.  As you can see, the overlay title is covering part of the model. In Green Screen Wizard Full we would make the model smaller to avoid this, as shown.

An example of the sandwich overlay is the crystal ball. This is a really cool affect. Simply load the foreground crystal ball overlay and then the background overlay of the crystal ball is loaded for you. 

Note how the foreground and the background images were both loaded.

You may have to resize and reposition the foreground and background images to make sure they are placed in the proper position so the images are shown properly.

Annotation Dialog

The annotation dialog is a very complicated but powerful dialog.  It can output simple text, paragraphs of text, thought bubbles, and place random images.

The annotation dialog is shown below. The first thing you must do is decide if you want to add text or images. 

Selecting the add text button will cause the following dialog to pop up:

This is the dialog for creating complex text. It allows you to specify just about every font option including font type, color, size, bold, and italic. It also supports three effects: outline, drop shadow, and glow.

The edit text control lets you enter multiple lines of text that can be justified using the Justify Text selector.

Once you have entered text in the text window you may preview the effect of the various dialog boxes in the preview window.  For example if we wanted red text with a black outline and a gold glow, all� in a Calligrapher font, these would be the settings:

Often text is displayed in a box, or in what is called a thought bubble.  Green Screen Wizard Pro allows you to enter any kind of background for the text.  If the background is neutral in color, then Green Screen Wizard Pro can change the color of that background to any color you like.  You can also apply effects like drop shadow and glowing to the background.  Because backgrounds can have irregular shapes, Green Screen Wizard Pro does not automatically place the text in the background for you.  It has to be dragged to the correct location in the background.  This dialog shows speech bubble and the text that should be displayed in it.  As you can see the speech bubble is too small for the text.  We can fix that by using the sliders to change the size of the speech bubble.  Once we have the bubble the proper size, we can use the mouse to drag the text into the proper position.

We then leave this dialog and return to the main text window.  As you can see a large blue square indicates where the text will be placed in the image.  We can move the text by dragging the square with the mouse.  The first picture shows the original position of the text and the second, after we’ve dragged it to where we want it. 

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Let’s add another text item, the text “Pro Version 4.0.”

When we return to the dialog we see that we still only have one blue box.  The blue box that is showing is the selected text in the select text control.  If we use our mouse to select the other line, then the blue box will indicate the position of that text.  To edit the text simply click the edit button and the text that is highlighted will be placed back into the text dialog.  We can then change the text or text properties. We may also delete the text by clicking the delete button. 

The image button is a simplified version of the text dialog.  It allows you to place an image randomly on the page.  You may place a few flowers in strategic positions or perhaps a little hat on a baby. There is no limit to what you can do using this feature.

Notice how the image is placed in front of the girl. If we change the layer to be placed on the background the image will go behind the girl.

Effects Dialog

Green Screen Wizard Pro 4.0 offers special effects.  Most of the effects can be applied to the foreground image or the background.  The first effect alters the image's color.  An image can be rendered in full color, black and white, sepia, or if it is a foreground image, as a silhouette.  The silhouette feature can create dramatic images with very little effort.  Simply have someone hold an interesting object or look to the right and you have very interesting silhouette.  Here are some examples of these features:

Black and white image

Sepia tone image

Color image on black and white background

Some silhouette examples

Often when pictures are taken in the real world the foreground image is sharp and the background is blurry.  In photographic terms this is called depth of field.  It is actually a flaw in the way lenses work.  If a lens was perfect it would focus perfectly at all depths.  Green Screen photography allows perfect depth of field. However, the final photos do not look as if they were taken with a real camera.  To correct this Green Screen Wizard Pro allows you to slightly blur the background.  This makes for more realistic photo and also tends to make the foreground image stand out better.  To obtain this affect, simply slide the Blur Background slider to the right.

Here’s a normal Green Screen Wizard Pro photo.

Here’s one with a slightly blurred background.

Digital images are often quite soft. You can use the Sharpen Output slider to fix this.  The sharpening is applied to the final output image.

Sometimes, particularly if you try to make a photograph look old, you’d like to introduce a little noise into the new photograph.  This can be done with the noise slider.

Batch Output

Batch is the most requested feature that is present in Green Screen Wizard Pro 4.0.  Unlike a normal batch process where a file is merged or processed, Green Screen Wizard Pro 4.0 allows you to take two sets of files, a foreground set and a background set, and multiply the two together.  For example if I had five backgrounds and three different foregrounds then I would have 15 images when the process was done. 

Green Screen Wizard Pro 4.0 now stores all of the settings that created a file in the file itself.  Refer to the explanation of GSW files earlier. The batch process can use these files in three ways. It can take the current image and just change the settings. It can take the current image and replace the settings and the background, or it can take the current image and replace the foreground and replace the settings.

Lets try a few examples:

The simplest example is to take the current image and replace the foreground image in the file. You would do this, for example, if you took photos of a baseball team and wanted to use the same background with each photo. To do this we specify the directory that has a foreground image as we’d like to merge. Then we specify the output directory where we would like them to go, and then we start the batch.  The process will continue until every file in the batch folder has been merged.

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This dialog shows the last file processed:

Here is the output from the batch run.

Next let’s take our current image and replace the background with all of the backgrounds found in a given directory.  We do this by selecting the background directory and running the background process.

If we specify both a foreground directory and a background directory, then for every foreground an image is created with every background.

Now let’s see what would happen if we specify a directory that has GSW files in it.

We choose to let the GSW file override the background by checking the “Use GSW Background”.

Here’s what the GSW files looked like.

Here is the output from the GSW batch.

Note how the foreground image is scaled and shifted by the GSW files. Also text and overlays can be added. With this ability you can create your best “looks,” and then create output for each look.

The batch system can produce low resolution thumbnail output, but by default it creates high resolution normal output.  This is controlled by the output low resolution checkbox.

You may also select to renumber your output and select the type of output.

By default the batch process creates an HTML file that allows the user to view all of the files processed simultaneously. This can be switched off by unchecking the Create HTML check box.

Once a batch process has created all of its files, the process terminates.  If you check the box that says “Keep Checking for New Files,” after the last file is process the batch system will sleep for 1 second, and then it will look to see if there are any new files in any of the specified folders. If it finds one or more it will process them and then display the last result in the last result box.  This is a handy feature if you’re doing tethered shooting. Every time the camera stores a new file in a watched directory that file will be processed and displayed.