Posted by Luis Ortega on 09/11/06 16:55

I have some cel animation drawings done on white paper that I will scan or
photograph and import into Photoshop and Premiere and I was wondering what
is the best way to create a blue screen effect so that I can drop a
background photo behind the cel drawings into the white of the paper.
Since there are quite a few cels in the animation, I can't really make a
selection of the backgrounds in each drawing in Photoshop and delete them so
I get a clear background for Premiere. I have tried several of the keying
filters (alpha, chroma, colour) and they each do a mediocre job of creating
a nice crisp knockout of the white background. One weird effect is that in
chroma key, as soon as I select the white background and bring up the
similarity slider a tiny bit, the blacks also disappear! So far, the colour
key filter seems the best but it's not perfect.
Is there anything I could do in Photoshop to prepare the cels better so that
the keyed out background is better? Is there some other method that I am
missing that could give me clean backgrounds and edges around the drawings?
Thanks for any advice

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