But is there a way to automate it - somehow?
If you are looking for a free solution, you find links, comments, clips all over - and learn a new feeling of stupidity. It just does not seem to work for you. Well, first of all one must decide what exactly one is up to. So this little tutorial is about greenscreen (or bluescreen or chromakey to use an exact term) for setting up small sales-articles in the internet. It is not about you in a video.
Grab the free picture editor "paint.net" right here: http://www.getpaint.net/
Second you could check the function "magic wand" in paint.net. It works, it is neat, but we want automation to some degree at least. Thus our alternative is to download a plugin called chromakey: (http://paint.net.amihotornot.com.au/Fea ... hroma_Key/)
Next, you ought to have some light green paper around (or light blue), put an object on top, do your photo, load it in Paint.net and run the option "photo" (not "foto") - and it works.
Talking from an antiquarian point of view, we need to have plenty products on stock, but do not need phantastic mirror images. We are rather somewhat conservative:
Old style pictures: http://www.zeitenwanderer.de/images/step1.jpg
The new style would be (presented on a homepage, in a compiled html-project or even locally like this):
http://www.zeitenwanderer.de/images/step3a.jpg
A little disappointed? Well, this post is not an advertising, it is supposed to give you a realistic view on what is to be expected from automated grenscreening. Besides, it is meant for situations, where one gets out hardly more than a few pennies and must hurry it up. It would look better, if I had not saved it as *.jpg. But I wanted to do so, that one would have a very fair idea.
This procedure will not win us photographers prizes, but our special customers hearts. (More modern objects should be worked on in a different fashion, but more about that one later.) So: This tutorial is about cheap one-of-a-kind products (in your stock), most of them will be used. Thus these pictures must give away details about the former usage and the basic equipment, not advertise an all new something. From this point of view, you can produce easily many photos for Ebay and Amazon and make them transparent.
Watch for the size (Ebay wants no less than 1200 x 1200 pixel nowadays) and that you save in *.gif-format for transparency. Jpg would leave you with a white background. This would work and the picture is a lot smaller in kb - which matters if you have dozens of them and want your customers to check your full stock. Good luck.
