Being able to composite images easily has always been a dream of still, video and film creators. Pulling a background and replacing it with another is still heavily used today by the broadcast industry. You only need to watch the evening weather report to see it in action.
The weatherman walks back and forth in front of a green wall and the broadcasting equipment pulls the green out of the signal, replacing it with the weather maps. It therefore gives the illusion of the weatherman walking in front of the actual maps themselves.
If you’ve got a project for school or work that could benefit with a different background, this is the software to make it happen. zMatte – part of the Digital Film Tools (DFT) collection – comes ready to work with many different software packages and systems you may already be using:
Photoshop CS3 and up
After Effects CS3 and up
Final Cut Pro 6 & 7
Avid Symphony, Media Composer, Newscutter, Xpress Pro (32/64 Bit)
Macintosh Multicore Intel® processor
Mac OS X 10.5.x – OS X 10.8.x
Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7
I had occasion to try out both the Photoshop plug-in as well as the After Effects plug-in.
After Effects
Let’s just say the plug-in was next near to magic the first time I tried it. It comes with default settings, and more often than not, you won’t need to tweak much to get it to work. The beauty of the software is that if you have a really problematic image, zMatte has every conceivable parameter you can adjust to get the matte just right. It will even do multiple matte creation, automatic spill suppression, sophisticated matte and edge manipulation, and color correction.
With the video clip shown here, I merely applied the filter to the clip and never had to adjust a single slider. The blue section of the wall in the gymnasium just dropped completely out, clean as could be and allowed my secondary footage to shine through.
Photoshop edition
Again, depending on the image, you have complete control over every element imaginable. Completely different than the video above, this particular product shot had everything wrong going 
for it. The green screen background was unevenly lit and highlights on the folds in the fabric shone through. The product itself had reflective edges and was picking up the green color in the foreground I was trying to save.
Luckily, with all the resources available in the software, it was a quick process to create a useable mask. Clicking around the edges to create a garbage mask, I was able to hide the incorrectly lit areas. The sliders then gave me all the control I needed to correctly key the balance of the product.
Clicking around the right side of the image I was able to drop out poorly lit parts of the greenscreen
zMatte works equally well with blue screen and green screen. Along with a wealth of other products, it’s available from DigitalFilmTool.com.