Westcott Green Screen Digital Photography Kit

by Photo Basics

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 8 x 2.5 inches ; 2.4 ounces
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B002SEUX7Q
• Item model number: 417
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (47 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
  • #70 in Camera & Photo > Accessories > Photo Studio > Photo Backgrounds
• Date first available at Amazon.com: October 2, 2001

Product Description

Green Screen is now beyond easy! Using the included SIMPLE software and just one click, import your photo and watch as the green screen is automatically removed! Then, place your subject anywhere by choosing one of the included 100 digital-photo quality backgrounds or your own! Background Categories include: Holiday, Sports, Music, Birthday, Whimsical, Baby, Retro, Futuristic and more! Perfect your images using the included software editing tools such as adjusting brightness, contrast, saturation and blur. Size to perfection utilizing the crop, flip and position tools. Control your subject and background independently for maximum results.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

64 of 65 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Easy to use, but not as useful as it should be, December 27, 2009

By 

tachi1 "tachi1" (Miami, FL United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Westcott Green Screen Digital Photography Kit (Electronics)

(What's this?)

The full name of this product is the FXhome PhotoKey 2 Lite. That should have given me a clue.

Right off the bat, FXhome PhotoKey2 Lite and I got off on the wrong foot. I've never before encountered a licensed version of a $70.00 program (not a free or trial version) that is so insistent in trying to force me to upgrade to a more expensive version. It begins from within the installation wizard; continues on the introductory video; "upgrade now" is actually one of the tools in the toolbox; and every grayed-out control has a pop up window indicating that you should upgrade now if you want that feature. When you consider just how many options are grayed out (half the filters, for example) that is a lot of irritating prompts.

First, the positive: the program does an outstanding job removing the chroma green. Even the green that shows up between hair and inside any nick and cranny of your subject is removed. Not only that, but there is no green spill or fringe left on the subject which, on other extraction filters I have used require going in and editing a slight green edge or a slight green color cast or reflection. I have used Photoshop and third-party extraction plug ins that don't work as well or as fast. It is a dead-on extraction and it happens instantly. When your image comes into the software interface, every trace of green is already gone. Absolutely amazing.

There is a problem, though, if you want to fully benefit from this wonderful extraction:

**Every wrinkle, crease, and fold in the green cloth has to be ironed out.

**The light has to be perfectly balanced so that your subject doesn't cast a shadow (as would happen if you used a camera flash). In some cases, a cast shadow is actually a plus when you later put it on a background, but usually it's not.

**If you have draped the cloth in such a way as to place your subject on the cloth with cloth behind it (such as placing your child or product on the cloth on the floor and continuing the cloth up the wall), the draping has to be smooth with no fold or bend mark, so squirming is forbidden.

**No part of the background outside of the 5' x7' green cloth can show in the image & if it does, it shows and it stays--it has to be green top/bottom & side/side. (5' x 7' is fine for small products and small children who stand still.)

**If any of these requirements is not met, the extraction won't work well.

Your shadows, folds, etc. will be left behind after the green is removed as gray areas--and the "lite" version offers no options for removing these spots post-capture (other than re-photographing!). Maybe the not-available Masks feature in the more expensive versions does but I'd have to spend another $75 to find out. I see no sign of a clone tool or an eraser tool to address these problems either among the available tools or among the grayed out tools--and all of these imperfections will appear as gray semi-transparent stains on top of the background when you insert it behind the image.

I am not as bothered as other reviewers by the selection of included backgrounds. There are very few I'd use for my purposes and the strange collection leaves me wondering who their target market might be. There is a limit to how many times you can place people in front of the pyramids or the leaning tower of Pisa, or a fairy forest or wild west saloon. Luckily, you do have the option of using your own high resolution backgrounds or solid-color backgrounds, or any background you create or buy. What you can't do is save these alternate backgrounds to the same folder. (That, too, is off limits).

Before I leave you with the idea that there are no useful tools whatsoever, let me correct that impression: there are scaling, position, and rotation tools for both the background and foreground; you can adjust brightness (so the lighting on both will match) as well as some color adjustment controls. You can also adjust transparency, contrast, saturation, and even apply some blur to both the foreground and background independently. On the whole, that is a lot of tools, they work well though not intuitively and the interface itself is a little confusing at first. There is also a convoluted crop tool where you subtract percentages of the image from the different sides.

But what you can't do, and usually will need to do, is correct mistakes caused by a less than perfect initial photograph. You can't even export just the extraction to Photoshop or Elements so you can correct the non-perfect areas there. Of all the grayed-out premium options we can't access, the inability to export just the extraction is the most unfair and irritating. If you export it to Photoshop, 'Lite' re-fills the formerly-green areas with white (complete with gray shadows, etc) and you have to re-extract it manually. Of course, extracting manually is exactly what I was trying to avoid by getting this product! It seems to me that, if I paid for software to make my extractions, I am entitled to these extractions--with or without their backgrounds.

On the whole, I'm going to give the product a 3-star rating simply because it is so incredibly accurate at extracting and I'm painfully aware of just how difficult that can be. Also, for my purposes of simple product photography for online auctions and web stores, this does the job. People with small children might find this fun despite the limitations as long as they don't expect perfection. Beyond that, it's questionable.

If some of the features that I can see (but not use) were available, I think this would be a first-class, 5-star product. As it is, it most certainly is not.

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Worked surprising well, software can be used for pictures not video however, January 13, 2010

By 

TW - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Westcott Green Screen Digital Photography Kit (Electronics)

(What's this?)

Initially, I thought that the software would allow you to process video against a green screen, but it turns out that the included software edits photos only. That being said, I put up the green screen (without ironing first) for a quick test, snapped a couple of pictures and was really impressed at how the software removed out the green. It was a pretty clean edit.

I have Adobe Premeire Elements for video editing and I tried the green screen with some simple video shots, and it worked well. Definitely iron out the wrinkles if you have a video editing program that you want to try out the chroma key feature to get the best results.

Pros:
+ Software is fairly easy to use
+ Adjusting the size and rotation of the foreground (usually the people in your picture) was really easily and worked well.
+ The screen is large enough that an adult can stand in front of it and be covered head to toe.
+ The software lets you export your photos to Tiff, Jpeg, and Png.
+ The green screen worked well when using it for video chroma key with a separate video editing program

Cons:
- It seemed like the program didn't like it much if someone was wearing something blue against the green screen. The blue colors stuck out like neon in the pictures.
- This is the Lite version, so yes, they are trying to get you to upgrade to the pro
- The included backgrounds weren't all that appealing. We've had more fun using out own.
- The included software is for editing pictures only, not video. You'll need something like Adobe Premiere Elements for video chroma key

19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars When they say "lite"...they mean it..., December 26, 2009

By 

35-year Technology Consumer "8-tracks to 802.11" (Mid Atlantic, USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Westcott Green Screen Digital Photography Kit (Electronics)

(What's this?)

This product is one that begs for a "half star" option, as it sits between 2 and 3 stars. It gets two stars primarily for the limited features in the included software (and the pricey upgrade path to the full-featured version which is pushed hard in the "Lite" package).

This package contains a 5' x 7' chroma key green screen fabric backdrop and an editing application (PhotoKey 2 Lite by FXHome).

The green screen cloth was simple to prepare and hang(the vendor recommends either ironing or tumbling in the dryer, as wrinkles in the cloth can create shadows in the image). I expected much lighter/thinner material, and was pleasantly surprised at how substantial it was.

In the world of "lite", "express", "compact" and other limited-feature software packages seeking to induce consumers to upgrade to their full-featured companions, PhotoKey 2 Lite should win a prize for amount of functions it limits.

Among the limitations in this "Lite" version:
-while basic cropping is available, it accomplished by a rather unintuitive set of slider bars; every other image editor I've ever used allowed you to mouse over the cropping area with a selection tool. Very odd,
-NONE of the "Mask" functions area available.
-four of the eight "Filter" functions are unavailable.
-three of the four "Effects" functions are unavailable.
-"Overlay" functionality (whatever it is) is available via download, but only after you've purchased something else from FXHome.

PhotoKey 2 Lite includes 100 digital background images to use with the pictures you take in front of the green screen. They are relatively high resolution .jpg images of various thematic, seasonal, regional and conceptual subjects. Note: since they are .jpg, you can also use any of your own .jpg images for backgrounds (or a nearly endless supply of royalty-free images available online).

Overall use is fairly simple:
(1) Import a foreground image (that you have photographed using the green screen). -Add a background image.
(2) Use the available features --and there aren't many!-- to modify the properties of both to create the final look of the image.
(3) Export the image to either .tif, .png or .jpg format.

The online support forums and knowledge base for this product are not particularly helpful; they did not yield results for either an error message I received (described below)or materials available for download.

I ran into a surprising technical issue with this software. Because of this version's limitations on cropping, I first used an external editor (Hypersnap version 6) to crop out portions of the image outside of the green screen. PhotoKey 2 Lite would not recognize .jpg images edited with Hypersnap. When attempting to use these pictures the software yielded this error message:
"this is not a valid image, or its type is not supported". However, images using Photoshop Elements version 8, and Picase version 3 they were recognized by PhotoKey 2 Lite without a problem. This is surprising since I've never had another image editing application have a problem working with images edited in Hypersnap.

So why two stars instead of three?
The included software pushes you aggressively to upgrade to the full-featured version, an upgrade that will cost you an *additional* $75. Instead, purchase a larger piece (9' x 15')of Chromakey Green Muslin for less than $50 and Adobe Photoshop Elements 8 PSE 8 for less than the upgrade path to PhotoKey 2. PSE 8 is quite capable of handling chroma key backgrounds as layers. If you are already a PSE 8 user, and want to add chroma key to your arsenal, you can do so for the cost of the green screen alone. If you are not a PSE 8 user: it will do everything this application does --and much more-- without the hard sell to upgrade to a "full featured" version.

This product will provide satisfactory, basic chroma key editing: but it's a one-trick pony. The limitations in the included software make that trick an unsophisticated one for its price.

I placed some images created using this product on the product page:
Westcott Green Screen Digital Photography Kit