There are dozens, if not hundreds, of green screen software programs out there if you do a Google search for green screen software.
When I first got into youth sports photography and started shooting with green screen backgrounds, I did that google search. I wanted great software and I wanted it cheap. It turns out that you get what you pay for.
In the video above, I go through a quick overview of Darkroom Core, especially its green screen function. You can watch as I take some photos from a youth sports league shoot and put them on a background and send them to the printer. A small team with a half-dozen orders can easily be finished in 5-10 minutes.
Maybe you’re currently paying a image extraction service $1 per image to remove your green background and return a PNG file to you. You then need to take that PNG and put it on a background. Or maybe you’re paying $3 per image to extract the subject and place then subject on a graphical background.
How many teams would it take you while paying outsource fees before you’ve spent more than $1,000 to one of these companies? If you have a league of 500 or more players, you may end up spending more than that for the one league.
It would estimate I have saved $10,000 per year by using Darkroom Core to do the image extractions and place them on the graphical background templates that I design in Darkroom Core. I don’t build most of these backgrounds from scratch, but buy photoshop backgrounds off the internet and convert them Darkroom templates.
I don’t work for a company that wrote or sells Darkroom Core. I’m just a small studio that has saved tens of thousands of dollars by being able to do this work in house.
Darkroom Core’s user manual is not very good and it took years of trial and error to figure out everything that I know know. I wish there had been some tutorials on the software back when I had a month to learn it before my busy season after I had invested $500 in it.
A month later I still didn’t know how then software worked, so I sat on my computer, unused, for a year.
In the video above, you can watch me build an “Attitude” Memory Mate like the one at right in a couple of minutes. And after the first one is built, the second one takes only a few seconds.
Don’t take my word for it, watch the video above to see how long it takes.
