Product · Chroma Studio
SP Photo Station's chroma-key compositor runs in the desktop workspace, previews against your branded background library in real time, and hands the exact same composite to the print path. What the operator sees on screen is what the customer takes home. No second tool, no second license, no second render.
Operators running green-screen photo programs typically stitch together two or three tools: a capture application that hands off to a separate desktop compositor, then a third tool for print queue management. Each handoff is a place where the preview the photographer sees and the composite the customer receives can diverge — and at peak Santa throughput, “looks fine in preview, prints with a green halo” is a guarantee of a refund.
SP Photo Station collapses the chroma path into the same workspace the photographer uses for everything else. The preview rendering is WebGL, the print rendering is C# + ImageShape, and both consume the same border template + background image. Diverging output between the two is a bug that fails CI, not an operational quirk you build a workaround for.
Two paths, one platform
Where it earns its license
Pre-built scene library per venue — fireplace, Santa's workshop, snowy front porch, ornament close-up. Operator picks the scene during capture or lets the customer choose at the viewing station. Family takes home four photos in four different scenes; capture took five seconds.
Inventory: §B.1 + §B.2
Branded destination overlays per character: castle interior for the princess line, tropical reef for the underwater character, snow mountain for the winter spirit. Same shoot, multiple destinations, performer doesn't repose.
Inventory: §B.2 + §B.6
High-throughput station: family walks up, photographer captures against green panel, family proceeds to viewing station seventy feet down the queue. Roaming-sync ingests the photo, the chroma composite renders the moment they tap their wristband, and the print is in their hand before they reach the ride entrance.
Inventory: §B.1 + §B.3
Pre-built backdrops per team, per sport, per season. Roster photo day runs all teams through one chroma station; the composite swap into team-specific backgrounds happens at the viewing / ordering screen. One capture set, dozens of team-specific products.
Inventory: §B.2 + §B.3
Conventional portrait backgrounds (grey gradient, blue marble, etc.) configured as the venue's background library. Photographer shoots the whole class against green; backgrounds get swapped at order time by parent preference. Eliminates the rebookings that come from 'I wish I'd picked the other backdrop.'
Inventory: §B.2 + §B.3
Brand partner ships you their branded backdrops; you ship them the chroma capture station + workspace. Live preview against the brand assets means the brand sees their setup is working before the activation begins, not after the campaign post-mortem.
Inventory: §B.2
Under the hood
Color-difference keying based on the Vlahos algorithm — the same foundation Hollywood VFX studios use. Color-spill correction subtracts reflected key light from foreground pixels (the green tinge on white shirts and skin tones gets neutralized).
Live preview runs as a WebGL fragment shader inside the desktop workspace (apps/workspace-v2). Per-frame GPU execution keeps latency under 100ms on the modest hardware specced for operator stations.
The print path is a separate C# + ImageShape compositor inside the desktop shell. Both paths consume the same border template + background image; CI runs preview vs print composite diffs on every build to catch divergence.
Sub-pixel edge feathering at the matte boundary; configurable feather width per border template. Fine-hair retention via standard despill + edge feather. Reflective objects and translucent props remain the chroma path's known weakness — run AI bg-removal for those cases.
Backgrounds managed in the admin portal as part of the border library. Border groups per location, season, event type. Per-customer PROOF watermark applied before gallery display. New backgrounds drop in as JPEG/PNG files sized to the print product aspect ratios.
Modest GPU on the operator workstation (Intel Iris Plus or newer integrated graphics, or any discrete GPU). If your station can run capture, it can run chroma — the preview was specced to share hardware with the existing workspace.
Common questions
No specific brand. Any solid, evenly-lit green panel works. Conventional studio greens (Rosco Chroma Key Green, Westcott Green) are widely available. Blue and red work identically; the only requirement is the backdrop color isn't present in the foreground (no green shirts on green-screen day).
Standard despill + edge-feather refinement handles most cases. The chroma path will struggle with fine-hair edges that AI segmentation models handle better — operators running portrait work that emphasizes hair detail typically run AI background removal instead. Both paths ship in the same platform; per-venue config picks which is active.
Even lighting on the backdrop is the only firm requirement. Two softbox-style lights at 45° to the backdrop, plus separate subject lighting that doesn't spill onto the backdrop, is the conventional setup. Despill correction tolerates moderate lighting variation; severely uneven backdrop lighting shows up as inconsistent edge detection that no algorithm can fix.
Both modes ship. The operator can lock the background per shoot (holiday Santa set with fixed scene), let the customer pick at the viewing station from a curated library, or expose the full library for self-service browsing. Per-venue config.
The same composite the operator previews is what the print path renders. The desktop shell (C# + ImageShape) consumes the same border template + background image as the WebGL preview. CI runs preview vs print composite diffs on every build to catch divergence.
Yes. Ship your own backdrop images and they drop into the admin portal's border library alongside any platform-provided templates. JPEG / PNG, sized to the print product aspect ratios. No file-format negotiation, no asset-pipeline integration step.
We'll bring up a green-screen station, run a sample shoot, and walk through the workspace + print path so you can see preview-to-print parity in real time.
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