BoothDock can replace the background in two ways: the classic route with a green cloth (chroma key), or with AI and no cloth at all. The template only decides whether the background is replaced and what it is replaced with. How good the result looks depends on the booth – which is why you tune it in the admin area under Camera, not in the design.
Which route suits you
| Green cloth (chroma) | AI cut-out | |
|---|---|---|
| Guest sees themselves in the scene beforehand | yes, in the viewfinder | no |
| Setup | cloth plus even lighting | nothing |
| Hardware | doesn't matter | graphics card recommended |
| Hats, glasses, props | often difficult | usually fine |
In short: if you have the space and the light, the cloth is the calmer choice. Where the setup has to stand in five minutes, the AI wins.
Tuning on the test photo
Under Camera → Tune cut-out you take a test photo and see every change on it immediately – not on your first guest.
- Pipette: clicking into the green of the test photo picks up the key colour. It averages a 5×5 area so that sensor noise doesn't hand you a random neighbouring colour.
- Tolerance decides how far a colour may differ from the key and still be removed.
- Edge softness is the width of the transition. Too hard looks cut out with scissors, too soft frays.
- Remove green cast (despill) takes away the green shimmer the cloth throws onto hair and shoulders. This is the setting with the most visible effect – in the AI route as well.
- Matte view shows the bare mask instead of the picture. Mistakes show up there earlier than in the finished photo.
Choosing a model
For the AI cut-out, each model shows how long it took on this booth per photo – measured on the machine itself, not copied from a manual. Two measured values on a 30-megapixel photo:
- Fast, good quality (built in, always available): around 0.2 s with a graphics card, 0.85 s without.
- People & hair (downloaded, about 490 MB): 2.5–3 s with a graphics card, around 23 s without.
The booth fetches the large model by itself at start-up as soon as a template uses AI cut-out, and switches to it once it is there. If you pick a model yourself, that choice stands – on a weak machine the built-in one is the right answer.
If no time is shown: the model has never run on this booth. Open Tune AI once and let it process a test photo, then the number appears.
Resolution: more is not better
The matte resolution is set to 1024 and should stay there. A cut-out model is trained on a particular image size; above it, the model no longer sees the person as a whole but only fragments – and the mask falls apart. Too small is wrong as well: at 512 the built-in model lost an entire shoulder on a 30-megapixel photo. Models with a fixed input size hide the setting, because it would have no effect there.
Order: cut out first, filter afterwards
Beauty and look are applied after the cut-out, onto the finished picture. That is not an accident: despill works with real green, and the edge refinement needs the colour image to find the hair edge. A black-and-white filter beforehand takes exactly that away. As a result the look sits on the subject and the background, which is more coherent anyway.
When the result isn't right
- Green fringe on hair: raise despill, and if needed shrink the edge by 1–2 px.
- Holes in the subject: tolerance too high, or the cloth is lit unevenly. Check the light before you touch sliders.
- Edge looks cut with scissors: raise the edge softness.
- AI loses body parts: check that the resolution is 1024; with dark clothing against a dark background, more light on the subject helps more than any setting.