getting white background?

[spphoto]

Which color background would be easy to mask out in PS and have PS replace it with pure white?  For Portrait.

Green?

[32BT]

If you need white, simply use a white background. Expose for the background being pure white. Leave room for a decent shadow if necessary. (RAW lattitude may already be enough).

Otherwise the generally accepted colors are blue and green, because these colors are least present in skintones. It that is your criterium, then you can obviously use the inverse color of the average skintone to be shot...

Which color background would be easy to mask out in PS and have PS replace it with pure white?  For Portrait.

Green?
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[maksim]

Using a colored background can produce problems. You can get colored reflections on the subject and have problems to mask fine structures like the hair. So the best way to get a full white background is to have a real white background and use a flash to light it. In PS you can easily get it to pure white using levels or curves.

[pobrien3]

Agreed.  Any method you choose for masking / selecting background area will be imperfect for portraiture as hair is always difficult and even the relatively 'clean' boundaries between skin and background are very hard to get looking natural.

Use a white background in the first place, doesn't have to be perfect.  Light it separately if you can, at least 2 stops brighter than your main exposure - more if your white background isn't as white as you'd like it!  If you want to render the background as pure white in PS, use levels and / or curves, masked if necessary.

[spphoto]

If you need white, simply use a white background. Expose for the background being pure white. Leave room for a decent shadow if necessary. (RAW lattitude may already be enough).

Otherwise the generally accepted colors are blue and green, because these colors are least present in skintones. It that is your criterium, then you can obviously use the inverse color of the average skintone to be shot...
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Do you mean light blue/green or dark?  Also, do you illumitate them w/strobes?

[Jonathan Wienke]

The easiest way to get a pure white background is to use a white background behind the subject. Have it about 10 feet behind the subject and use a separate strobe to light the background. Then all you have to do is turn up the background light until the background us pure blown-out white. The distance between the subject and background is necessary to keep spill light reflecting off the background from overexposing or excessively backlighting the subject. I did something similar shooting some products. I used a white plexiglas shooting table and I had two lights on the product and a third light behind the table background. By balancing the power between the subject lights and the background light, I was able to blow the background to pure white in-camera without having to do any masking and background editing in Photoshop, which saved me several hours of work.