I love this week’s winner of the How CS4 Saved The Day Contest, Tim McCarty. His story is TOTALLY how every quick design job goes, and you can feel the pressure coming on. It’s short, it’s sweet, and its Adobe FTW!!! Read it below:

“I need an 8×10 green screen photo of each cast member superimposed onto a cool background,” says the Director.
“By when?” I ask.
“Opening performance – day after tomorrow.”
“Ahhh … shouldn’t be an issue.”
“Okay it’s a deal, I’ll tell the cast.”
“By the way, how many are in the cast?”
“200″

My jaw drops.

The shoot takes three hours, pumping them out at less than a minute per
member. Time is slipping away. I only have the evenings to edit as I’m not a full time photographer. For green screen photos I normally use an aftermarket Photoshop plug-in. The plug-in does a great job and is fairly quick taking me about 5 minutes per photo to get a clean result.

Let’s see 5 minutes times 200 = 1000 minutes divided by 60 minutes equals … 16.6 hours! I’m not going to make it!

That evening, I frantically convert from raw and start editing. Quickly I realize it’s no use – there has to be a faster way. I visit the layers magazine website and educate myself on CS4′s new mask panel with color range selection and the new adjustment panel – sweet!

The Layers Magazine tutorials are a huge help. I mix the panels into a workflow with a channels mask and capture the whole process in an action (including adding a background layer). I then batch process all the photos and literally one half hour later I am done! I’m so totally impressed.