Alyssa Bell
I looked at your image. I think you may would benefit from using a little bit of rim lighting or kickers on the hair. This can really help isolate the hair when shooting green screen.
Regarding the depth of field, it was OKish for extraction but the isolated hair strands are a little defocused into the screen. I see you were at 105mm, f9. With extractions for individual hair strands it extracts best with a larger depth of field and to keep the hair strands as sharp as possible. I realize this goes against the principles of portrait photography where you don’t usually want everything tack sharp. However, for extractions it can really help if you are trying to retain hair strands. Not sure how much you can stop down since you are already at f9. Maybe for green screen screen a slightly wider lens like 50mm-85mm would keep the strands a little sharper without having to stop down.
See the attached screenshot showing a color sample when zooming way into the hair. There are 2 things to notice. First, notice the slight defocusing of the hair which is due to 105 mm/f9 being focused on the eyes and the slight DOF falloff at the hair. this blends green into the hair. Next the to note is the point color sample value of hue=111, brightness=54, saturation=50. These values fall right into the middle of chroma green. So basically, the hair itself is a pure chroma key green color just a slight shade different from the background. This makes it pretty much impossible for the color selection algorithm to retain the hair.
Note that this color sample was after the image was converted to sRGB. I noticed your image was Adobe RGB 1998. Note that EZ Green Screen converts to sRGB before extracting so I did the color sample in sRGB.
Adding a rim light would illuminate the hair so it is “less green”. The rim light would cause a higher percentage of the color of the hair to be represents by the light hitting the hair instead of the light reflected from the screen being mixed with the hair.
I realize that none of these suggestions may be what you want for how you want to shoot the portrait. However, they do help with the extractions so I am provided that feedback for your knowledge.
Regarding the best way to attempt retaining hair like this, selecting by color won’t work since the hair strands are green. So it then become a job for AI to select instead of by color. With EZ Green Screen, the Refine Hair Settings section uses Photoshop AI. The auto refinement in the full batch mode can work for some images, but in your case it isn’t. So the only thing that can be done is switch to Dual Mask manual which will use Photoshop’s Select and Mask AI at a given radius. You could also run select and mask and paint in it using the Refine Mask brush too.
See the second screenshot for the best settings I found which was increasing the dual mask radius to around 200px.
However, even with these settings, I’m not sure if the results will be what you want. If not, then you may try one of the online AI extraction services like remove.bg or Skylab. They may work better. their AI tends to be better than Photoshop’s AI. I know this may not be the answer you want but it may work better…. not sure though.
For the next shoot, I would experiment with more rim lighting and trying to get a little larger DOF if you can and see if EZ Green Screen is then more automatable.
