While it’s currently the height of summer in the only hemisphere that (supposedly) matters, where I live in Australia it’s so cold that the state I live in saw snow for the first time in 30 years. When faced with the prospect of driving 2.5 hours to photograph said snow OR hibernating under blankets, I decided to stay in the warmth of my home and research how to make my own snow. Problem being that no two tutorials use the same method to add snow and some weren’t even convincing so after much experimentation I bring to you the Photoshop-snow-makin’-machine that I like best. Note: This was the exact workflow I used in my image this week but to demonstrate some of the steps for creating snow I’ve used a forest image from Graphic Stock so it’s easier to see the results.
In your layer’s panel you should see a tab labelled ‘Channels’ but if you don’t you can access it with Window>Channels. Now you need to look at each of the colour channels to see which has the most white showing in the areas where you want your snow. Do this by clicking the eye next to Red and Green so only Blue is showing, then turn on Green and turn off Blue etc, etc. When you’ve chosen the channel you wish to work with drag it to the new layer button at the bottom of the layer’s panel to duplicate the channel. If you want to get fancy you can add a curves (Ctrl/Cmd M) or a levels (Ctrl/Cmd L) adjustment to the channel to create more or less white in your image.
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Now stay with me here ... Ctrl/Cmd click on the channel to turn it into a selection and then switch back to your Layers tab. Create a new layer. Click on the top square of the colour swatch in your tools palette and choose a colour a little under white. Click OK. Go to Edit>Fill and choose Foreground Color. Ctrl/Cmd D to get rid of the selection. Pretty magical right?
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If you aren’t entirely happy with the result you can continue to create more snow by pressing Ctrl/Cmd J to duplicate the layer or follow this process again with different colour channels. You can also mask in some snow in areas that you feel need more.
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Add noise[/caption]
Add a Threshold adjustment layer and drag the slider until you get a nice spacing between your snowflakes. Clip the threshold layer to the noise layer (by alt clicking between the two layers).
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With the noise layer selected go to Filters>Pixelate>Crystallize and move the slider to 10. Press OK. Change the blending mode of the layer to Screen to get rid of the black background.
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Add some movement to the snowflakes with Filter>Blur>Motion Blur and adjust the angle and the amount to taste. Pull down the opacity of the layer a touch. Done! This gives a nice snowfall to use in the background of your image but it’s all the same size so we don’t want to stop there.
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Photoshop's soft brush in brush settings panel[/caption]
Under Brush Tip Shape start off with a brush about the size of a grain of rice. Make your hardness 0 and your spacing around 230. Under Shape Dynamics, change your Size Jitter to 100%, your Angle Jitter to 10% and your Roundness Jitter to 35%. Under Scattering tick the Both Axes box and take your Scatter all the way up and make your Count about 10. Under Transfer take your Opacity and Flow Jitter sliders all the way up.
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Now start to paint in your medium snow using a few clicks because it’s easier to control than dragging your mouse around.
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On your large snowflake layer make your brush about the size of a small coin and just dot in some large snowflakes. Save this as a brush preset if you wish to use it for future use by clicking the menu icon at the top right of your brush settings panel and choosing ‘New Brush Preset’.
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If you have people in your scene spend some time brushing snow into their hair and clothes. Using the same brush we created, set the size to 25 pixels, scattering to 60 and with this you can draw little piles of snow. It’s time consuming but will really help make your scene convincing.
Lastly, depending on the original colour of the image it might help to add some bluish toning. I chose to add a solid color layer filled with blue, set the blend mode to Hue and reduced the opacity slightly.
Let it snow! Let it snow. Let it snoooow.
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About 'Rest Stop in Winterglen'
Every Christmas in Brisbane, Australia a magical world appears called Lollipop Land. The keepers of Lollipop Land, Jule Barten (visual designer) and Chris Boston (doll designer) were kind enough to let me photograph there after hours last January but I haven’t had the right project for the photos (until now).
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I chose to work with their gorgeous Enchanted Forest scene, posing myself on the unicorn (supplied by Natureworks) and taking a 25 shot panorama. I composited in snow and hedges to cover the wooden floor. I added icicles (from Graphic Stock) to the roof and and an ice cave (from DeviantArt) to cover the ceiling. The trees outside of the ice cave are also from Graphic Stock. The dragon was photographed in another area of Lollipop Land but moved into the scene. My favourite part is that the unicorn has a seat built into him so I had to composite in a real horse’s “ass” for realism. I added snow using all the methods above and spent days colour toning the image (only to later delete three-quarters of what I'd done). Lollipop Land is a magical place to spend time (their high teas are great fun) so do visit if you get the chance.
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Using special effects can instantly transform an ordinary photo into a magical scene, and they’re not nearly as complex to create as it seems. Traditionally artists use bright, glowing light to signify magic or special powers but if you set off fireworks or bring out your glowsticks during the day you’re not going to impress anyone. That’s why when working with special effects you’ll ideally want a dark base photo. I’m not saying it’s impossible to use special effects on a light background but they’re probably not going to be super effective.
Light effect from Flame Painter[/caption]
If you expect to use special effects a lot in your work the designer sevenstyles creates and sells amazing actions designed to add special effects with a couple of clicks.
Because magic is the underlying theme of my blog I decided that turning myself into a magician would be a good way to illustrate how to use special effects. Coincidentally, I recently realised that the bird on my business card (created for me by a designer in the UK) is almost the same bird on the cover of the book I'm currently reading, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, which just happens to be a book about two magicians. I photographed myself in my garage against a black sheet using a household lamp and Speedlite for lighting. It took forever to get a flattering light set-up. The girl is made up of different photos of parts of my body while the hat and flying hair were shot separately. The rabbit came from a Graphic Stock image that I turned into a Photoshop brush and added a glow to. The background curtain and all light effects are from Graphic Stock. I was thinking about Donnie Darko while conceiving this image which might be how I ended up with a Frank-like light flare over my eye. This is why it's important to ingest as much culture as you can if you're a creative person so all this stuff can swirl around in your psyche and manifest itself in interesting ways. Hey presto!
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Photoshop brushes are a brilliant way to add interest to your photos but did you know you can use brushes on layer masks? Say, for example, you want to create a bird made of fire, you could take a picture of fire, add a black layer mask to it and then using a bird-shaped brush paint with white on the mask to reveal the fire in just the shape of the bird. Here, let me show you what I mean … [gallery columns="2" link="none" size="medium" ids="2112,2113"]
* Fire stock and bird brush courtesy of DeviantArt.
Yeah, phoenix baby! Using brushes on layer masks you can create a fun dispersion effect that makes your subject look like they're breaking into pieces and scattering away. Perfect for those moments when something really awkward has happened and you wish you could dissolve away into nothing.
My base image[/caption]
Pretty[/caption]
Dispersion effect on liquify layer[/caption]
Bats added[/caption]
One of Photoshop’s coolest features is the ability to customise and import different brushes. Until now you might only have used Photoshop’s standard round brush to paint masks that hide and reveal layers. But if you spend some time with the brush panels you’ll discover that using different brushes not only makes your work easier but will give life to your photography in ways you’d never dreamed were possible. And the best part is you don’t even have to be able to paint or draw! Hooray!
Here are some examples of Photoshop brushes. With a single mouse click I created grass, smoke, the moon, scattered leaves, hair, birds, blood and ink spatters, clouds, stars, fire trees and snow. And that’s just a small sample of the brushes available. You can then customise these further by playing around in the brush options, adding colour, and using the transform tool to move and warp the brush as you desire.
Edit>Fill the canvas with white (if it isn't already). Using black, draw the shape you wish to turn into a brush. Vary the opacity of your brush to give areas of transparency for depth. If you don't like to draw an easier way is to make a selection from another photo and drag that onto your blank canvas. Use Edit>Transform to resize the selection to fit your canvas and then Image>Adjustments>Desaturate. Whatever is white becomes invisible so you may need to go to Image>Adjustments>Invert to swap white to black (and vice versa) and then play around with Image>Adjustments>Brightness/Contrast to get your tones as desired.
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Then go to Edit>Define Brush Preset, name your brush, press OK and your brush will now be at the bottom of the Brush Preset Picker ready to use!
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Define new brush preset[/caption]
If you have Photoshop CC you can also download the Adobe Brush CC app on your phone or tablet to create brushes that sync with Photoshop (although I found it I bit hard to create anything usable).
Shape dynamics[/caption]
Scattering[/caption]
Color dynamics[/caption]
Transfer[/caption]
These are the options you’ll probably use the most but there are other options in the menu you may wish to play around with such as adding texture, noise and wet edges to your brush.
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If you use a tablet with Photoshop you can use the brush panel to control how your pen pressure affects the brush tool so it will mimic your drawing. (I highly recommend using a tablet by the way – I have a small Wacom Intuos Pro which I love but sadly no desk to put it on! So I usually get by without it *sad face*)
Use a Color blending mode to add colour by hand[/caption]
Use gradient map to add a range of colour tones.[/caption]
And that's it for my round up on brushes! Brushes are brilliant in compositing for tasks like drawing hair (because selecting real hair is too difficult), for drawing grass in front of your subject to make them look like they were really in a scene or drawing trees along a horizon line to hide a seam between your foreground layer and a replaced sky. Endless possibilities!
About ‘The Endless Delight of Delirium’
This week’s image is based on the character ‘Delirium’ from the greatest graphic novel series ever written, The Sandman by Neil Gaiman. I’ve always wanted to create a photo around Delirium because she’s so visually interesting, often surrounded by fish and butterflies (and sometimes frogs and bubbles). Because each of the Sandman comics was illustrated by a different artist the appearance of the characters change, so in researching this image I looked at many different interpretations of Delirium and designed my costume around the common elements. For example she has red hair, sometimes shaved on one side, sometimes with stripes of colour. She has one green and one blue eye. She is always wearing fishnets, and sometimes mismatched socks and a tutu. Watercolour and swirls are used to allude to her delirious mental state. I shot the images of myself and the bubbles in my garage with a Speedlite.
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The brushes I found in various places on the Internet but after they were added I felt the image lacked depth so I composited in some real photos of fish I photographed at Underwater World, Mooloolaba and butterflies photographed at Penang Butterfly Farm in Malaysia. The background is a paper texture from Lost & Taken.
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Composited fish and butterflies[/caption]
Working on this image was a joy from start to finish. Let me know what you think!
A little known fact about me is that I’m a bit obsessed with miniatures. There’s just something about dioramas, terrariums and the work of artists like Thomas Doyle, Slinkachu, and Lori Nix that thrill me beyond explanation. Because of this I went through a fun phase of photographing Smurfs and other toys around my house. But now with the help of compositing I can use myself instead of figurines to insert into small scenes, instantly turning everyday objects into magical worlds. There’s not a single object that doesn’t become significantly more interesting by the addition of a tiny person interacting with it. [gallery size="medium" columns="4" ids="1995,1997,1996,1994"] For example, I am staring at a water bottle. If I put a small person in that scene I could show them jumping to try and reach the lid, I could place it on its side and have a person drinking or bathing in the spill of water, I could have someone trapped inside the bottle. Instantly, one of the most dull objects in the world becomes something fascinating. It’s a really fun exercise and I encourage you to give it a go. Even the least creative people would be hard-pressed not to come up with SOMETHING.
I couldn't use a telephoto this time because my scene (bottom left) was too close to a wall.[/caption]
A macro lens isn't necessary but if your scene is quite tiny it would certainly help you get in close enough. If space allows I like to use a telephoto lens positioned far back from the scene but zoomed right in close because this gives good focus where I want it and a nice blurry background to remove distractions.
Find your focus. You can’t exactly have someone stand in the scene for you while you find focus so put something in your scene to focus on. A small human shaped toy is ideal because it helps later to find the right sizing for your person and also because the shadow it casts can possibly be used in the final image, but do remember to remove the toy from the scene once you’ve found and locked your focus so you can take your main blank shot.
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My scene - I just focused on the ground where I knew the girl would go.[/caption]
When you’re happy with the scene you’ll need to shoot your person. To preserve your sanity my suggestion is to try and shoot them in the same area so the light matches and you won’t have to do a tonne of work in post to make them fit. You’ll also need to shoot them from a similar angle. If you shot your scene from above you’ll need to shoot your person from above. When starting out I’d advise shooting both your person and your scene directly on. For this week’s image I shot my scene very low to the ground but still slightly above where my subject would be so I also shot the image of myself close to the ground but slightly above (although in retrospect I didn’t get high enough). To keep things easy for yourself have your subject pose in a way that is mainly flat to the camera. For my image this week I had myself laying straight and parallel to camera so I knew my whole body would be in focus. Had I laid with my head close to camera and my feet far away then I would have had some real issues with focus.
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The subject shot[/caption]
Be mindful of where your subject is positioned to avoid any colour casts. For example, the ground of my scene was primarily brown rocks and mulch. I couldn’t fit myself into that same space to shoot the subject image so I had to shoot myself lying on grass nearby. I knew that grass would not only give my skin a green colour cast but that parts of it would obscure my body and since there’s no grass in my scene these would need to be removed. To avoid unnecessary work I instead lay on a brown coloured towel so the colours would match. This sort of forethought is so important when creating composited images to save headaches later.
If the subject will be interacting with an object in the miniature try and recreate this in the full size scene, for example, if I want my person leaning against that water bottle then have them lean against a bookcase or a wall.
I’ve always been fascinated with Bowerbirds and in particular the Satin Bowerbird which collects blue objects to surround their bower. Having never seen one in person I researched pictures on the Internet and created my own bower using sticks collected from my backyard, stuck into polystyrene and surrounded with mulch, and even with opposable thumbs it's still nowhere near as good as the beak created version. I then had great fun collecting blue objects from around the house. Those with a keen eye will spot a smurf amongst the collection. The ridiculous irony in this is that a week later I was holidaying at Binna Burra in Lamington National Park and actually got to see a REAL bowerbird bower. Oh life, you’re so hilarious.
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A real bower with a poor blue collection.[/caption]
The scene is a two shot expansion stitched together. I've had a terrible time making the girl fit and only just now realised that it's because she's too flat so I need to warp her midsection so it sits lower. However because I've done so much work to the image I'd practically have to start again to fix it. It's a good lesson that not every image will work so don't feel too blue about it (badum tish).
The wonderful thing about compositing is that you're no longer limited by size so, not only can you make people small, you can also turn water features into waterfalls and rocks into mountains so don't forget to utilise this handy trick in your future work.
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Oh god, MY EYES![/caption]
HDR is photography’s most controversial technique because when overused it produces garish results capable of making your eyes bleed. Cameras are limited in the tones they can capture, meaning if you expose to get detail in the shadows, your highlights will blow out, or if you expose to get detail in the highlights, the shadows go very dark. HDR, short for high dynamic range, is a processing technique that gives photographers the ability to create images with a higher range of detail from lights to darks, giving a sort of hyper-real effect. Used in moderation it’s a really effective technique that brings detail into every portion of your image, more in line with how our eyes actually see a scene. For three years I eagerly processed ALL of my images this way because I liked the look of it so much, even when it was probably overkill.
HDR is traditionally created by taking a number of photos of the same scene with different camera settings and then blending those images together with post processing software. But using Adobe Camera RAW or Lightroom you can also give a single image the HDR look, which is how I usually do it. I’ll touch on both methods today.
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Any option with a triangle on top of other triangles is a continuous shooting mode. Image courtesy of Canon.[/caption]
Photomatix Pro using Enhanced[/caption]
The most lauded HDR software is Photomatix Pro which retails for about $100 - although you can play around with a trial version first to see if you like it. It’s easy to use and will walk you through the process of combining your HDRs. But while Photomatix offers the most options, the majority of them are way over the top. However you can customise the sliders to your own taste. The ‘Enhanced’ preset was the most natural looking option for me but I wasn’t entirely thrilled with the way Photomatix combined my exposures. It’s worth the investment if you’re serious about HDR but if you prefer subtle results I’d personally look elsewhere.
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Photoshop HDR[/caption]
Photoshop has its own HDR function which you can access with File>Automate>Merge to HDR Pro. Open the files you wish to use and check the box to align them if there was some movement between exposures. In the next dialogue box, play around with the presets and sliders. Tone mapping HDR images is very much about personal taste so I won’t spend time explaining all the options as plenty of other bloggers already have. But I will mention that if you find an element in your images has moved, check the ‘Remove ghosts’ box and Photoshop will attempt to fix it. Because subtlety is key for me I found the results from Photoshop were still a bit too strong.
Lightroom has recently added an HDR function to its workflow with version 6. Highlight the images you wish to merge and go to Photo>Photo Merge>HDR. On the next screen click to ‘Auto Tone’ and choose ‘Auto Align’ if your camera moved between exposures. Choose a deghost amount if necessary. The resulting image won't look typically HDR but it will throw you into your Develop dialogue box with the sliders moved to best enhance your photo, which you can adjust to taste. I was really not expecting to like this new feature considering it was added as an afterthought but I really love that I can play around with sliders I’m already familiar with, so this is the method I chose for this week’s image.
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There’s one other method I experimented with this week which isn’t really HDR but it’s a good option for selectively combining your exposures … so if I only want my underexposed photo to show up in the sky and my overexposed photo to show up in the shadows. This method involves ‘Luminosity masks’ which use Photoshop masks to obscure and reveal various light values. So I could use a ‘Brights Mask’ to select all the bright values in my image and have my underexposed photo show through in just those areas. Now the guru in luminosity masks is a chap named Jimmy McIntyre so if you’re interested in this technique, please visit his website and download the free action panel which creates all the masks for you at a click of a button! You can then refine the masks as necessary.
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Create three exposures from one image[/caption]
The most well-known way for creating HDR out of a single image is to duplicate the image three times and then raise the exposure of one and lower the exposure of the other and then combine these together using the methods covered above. This is completely unnecessary and just adds noise to your image. The way I do it, which I was so overly fond of for so many years is by opening your image in Lightroom and copying these sliders. As each image is different you’ll need to fine-tune the sliders to taste but I have these sliders set as a Lightroom preset so I can apply it quickly and at least see if an image has potential. This is my biggest editing secret! It's also a technique that photographers like John Wilhelm and Adrian Sommerling use to achieve their almost cartoon-like effect (I think).
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Drop the highlights, raise the shadows and move the other sliders to taste.[/caption]
Compositing gives photographers the magical power to change the weather. Most people crave a sunny sky but for conceptual and landscape photographers the more colour and cloud in the sky the better. We go to so much effort to make a scene beautiful and interesting and are often let down by those bright, washed out skies. This is why photographers like to be up at the crack of dawn capturing sunrises. It’s also why photographers who don’t use Photoshop buy expensive filters, why photographers who do use Photoshop take two exposures—one exposing for the land and one exposing for the sky—and blends them together. And then there’s the third camp who are perfectly comfortable messing with reality and swap their skies for entirely different ones. This is the sleeper-inners method so stick with me to learn how to replace a sky if you’re not a morning person. [gallery size="medium" link="none" ids="1925,1926,1927"] If all horizons were straight and not covered by mountains and trees then replacing a sky would be a breeze but things just aren’t that simple. Because of this there’s more than one way to replace a sky in Photoshop and it can take some experimenting to find the one that works best for your image.
In desperate need of a new sky[/caption]
Reduce opacity of sky layer to see where to move it to[/caption]
I personally like to experiment with a few sky options rather than limiting myself to one. So in Lightroom highlight all your chosen skies and go to Photo->Edit In->Open as Layers in Photoshop and then one by one, use the move tool (V) to drag each sky up to the document tab of the foreground image and then down onto the canvas. Lower the opacity of your sky image using the Opacity setting in your layers palette and move your sky into place. Edit->Transform->Flip Horizontal if you think the sky will work better flipped. If you want to scale or stretch your sky image press Ctrl/Cmd T and drag the corners of the bounding box to resize. Hold down shift if you want to resize with the same proportions.
In no particular order here’s all the different methods I know of for adding a new sky.
Color range selection[/caption]
This method works best if your original sky is primarily one flat colour. Drag your sky layer below your subject layer. With the subject layer highlighted go to Select->Color Range. I prefer to use ‘Sampled Colors’ and then use the eyedropper to sample the original sky’s colour but you can also try choosing ‘Blues’ in the dropdown menu. In your preview box you can see what will be selected (areas of white) and what won’t be selected (areas of black). Play around with your fuzziness slider to refine the selection and use the + and – eyedropper tools to add and remove from your selection. Click OK when you’re happy. If the selection has missed any bits you can choose the lasso tool and holding down Shift draw around any bits of the sky you want to get rid of. Press the add layer mask button which might apply the new sky to your foreground. Obviously this is not what you want! So press Ctrl/Cmd i to swap your mask’s colours. And there you have it—a new sky!
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Blend modes[/caption]
For this method I’d drag your sky layer above your subject layer. With the move tool selected (V) press Shift and + or – to cycle through your blend modes which can be found in the layer’s palette under the drop down menu that says ‘Normal’. If your sky is close to pure white you might find ‘Multiply’ works best. When you find one you like, add a white layer mask to your top layer and with this mask selected choose a big soft brush set to around 50% opacity and brush the new sky away from your subject and foreground. You may have to switch between black and white brushes to refine the mask until you’re happy. Be sure to erase the seam of the new sky image at 100% to get rid of any harsh lines.
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Gradient bar[/caption]
This method is my favourite for replacing skies although if you’re looking for a very exact horizon line you won’t find it here. I like this method because it brings some of the sky over your image which adds atmosphere. It was particularly great for my image this week to mask out the distracting trees in the background (see my final image for the result!) Place your sky layer above your foreground layer. Add a mask to the sky layer and grab the gradient tool (G). In your options bar at the top, click on the drop down arrow next to the gradient bar and select the third 
option along the top which is black->white. Also make sure that the linear gradient is selected (the first box to the right of the gradient bar). With the sky’s mask selected drag your gradient tool from the bottom of your image towards the top. This creates a smooth gradient mask that makes your new sky fully visible at the top, tapering off to reveal the foreground underneath. If you didn’t get the gradient quite right keep redrawing it until you're happy. Vary the position where you start drawing the gradient and the length of the gradient you draw. With your mask still selected you may then have to use a soft brush tool loaded with black to erase the effect fully from your subject.
If you’re experimenting with different skies and you're working with one of the above methods that uses a mask you can Alt-click and drag your mask from one layer to another without having to create it again each time. When your new sky is in place I’d suggest playing around with the colours of the overall image (a selective colour adjustment layer is my go-to method) to make your sky and your foreground look like they belong together. A texture or noise layer may also help.
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Too many photos[/caption]
I’ve been serious about photography for about five years now but even before that I always had a camera within reach. As a result I have over 80,000 photos in my Lightroom catalogue that I thought would never see the light of day, and the really exciting thing about compositing is that I can now choose any one of those 80,000 photos and build something out of it. The bad thing about compositing is that you start hanging on to every photo, even the truly awful blurry ones, because you just never know if it might one day make a great texture.
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You can walk through my shot and I don't even care![/caption]
When I decided I wanted to be a conceptual photographer I noticed that my shooting style completely changed. Before, I always waited until exactly the right moment to click my shutter so that the composition was perfect and free from distraction. After, I started caring less about that perfect shot and more about the elements in the photo, knowing that I could cut them out later and create something new with them. So I no longer cared if people were walking through the shot or the horizon line was askew because all that mattered is that the subject I wanted looked good.
There are plenty of purists out there who think compositing is cheating but I think they’re missing out on all the fun, so if you decide you’d rather join TEAM FUN and let compositing into your workflow you’ll want to start building a stock library. Of course you can always purchase stock from a stock photography agency which is great when you need a photo of something you just can’t capture yourself, but it’s always better to create something for free that is purely your own work. My initial goal this week was to make an image entirely out of purchased stock to demonstrate how to create something out of nothing but I realised it’s much more fulfilling working from your own stock library so I want to talk about how to build your own.
Speckled lighting sucks[/caption]
Next I browsed through my own catalogue using the ‘composite’ keyword and settled on an image that I’ve always liked taken at the Abbey Medieval Festival of a boy in costume. I went searching for a ‘location’ to place him in and found these images of Eilean Donan castle which I shot in Scotland a few years back. I think they’re really nice landscapes but as my landscapes never see the light of day I thought I’d repurpose them in a composite. I liked that I’d shot the castle from a few different angles and I started thinking about how I could tell a story using companion photographs that takes place on different sides of the bridge. The two birds of prey and the dog were also photographed at the Abbey Medieval Festival, as was the girl. It took a bit of experimenting to find a costumed girl in a pose that worked. As I don’t have permission from either the boy or the girl to use their photos I covered both their faces in masks, also composited from photos of different people at the festival (taken on a different year). This was quite handy in the girl’s case because her face and chest were overexposed which is damn near impossible to fix. The boy’s horse was photographed at my cousin’s property, his sky was shot while I was riding a local ferry, hers in Malaysia. Her silhouetted birds were shot in Bath and his at a local beach. Because the light hit all these components in different ways it took a tonne of editing to make everything fit. I finished by overlaying the images with four different textures.
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A stock library is not only handy for creating composites but shooting stock is also a fantastic way to improve your photography skills. Plus a great little money spinner if you decide to sell your stock to an agency. So grab your camera and start collecting!
The word compositing has a boring textbook definition that in a nutshell means “how the magic happens”. Compositing made it possible for Harry Potter to fly around a Quidditch pitch, for Spider-Man to swing between buildings, and for men to walk on the moon. (Just kidding.) (Or am I?) By combining elements from different pictures into one, compositing allows photographers to trick you in more ways than you could possibly fathom . It's used by wedding and school photographers to remove blinking faces in group shots, by newborn photographers to create those baby sleeping with head on hands shots, by landscape photographers to switch a boring blue sky with a moody cloud-filled one. So how does compositing work? Let's say I want a photo of me climbing the Eiffel Tower. I take a picture of me pretending to climb something, use Photoshop to cut myself out and paste me onto a picture of the Eiffel Tower and voila, there I am climbing the Eiffel Tower. However without following the rules of good compositing there’s no guarantee it’ll look convincing. Admittedly compositing TERRIFIES me, not only because it offers unlimited possibilities—the indecisive person’s worst nightmare—but also because there’s a lot to get right for a composite to look real. I’ve done compositing in previous tutorials but in most cases all the components were shot in the same location with the same lighting and camera position so the chances that something wouldn’t fit were low. The stakes are much higher when you’re trying to piece together images from entirely different situations.
For Dream's Quest my base image was a photograph of a lovely painterly garden I took in Pitlochry in Scotland. I wanted to ease into compositing with the simple aim of shooting myself separately and making myself fit into the garden scene.
When shooting your composite components you’ll need to consider the following:
Because my base image was an overgrown garden I shot myself sitting in grass in my backyard so the foliage and the colour would match between scenes. Had I not been wearing a green dress, shooting on green would also have made it easy to select myself out of my background by using Select->Color Range, selecting the greens and them adding a layer mask that hides the selection.
Posing – Be sure to position your person, prop or scene so it will fit your base image. If you’re compositing a prop onto a person make sure they’re posed in a way to accommodate this prop by giving them something of a similar size or shape to hold.
A bad composite - the girl is out of focus but the suitcase is in focus.[/caption]
and yet the background is shot so everything is in focus, as soon as you put that blurry person into that sharp background it’s going to look horrible and fake. You also need to ensure that the area you focus on in the second image matches the focal point in your base image.
In Photoshop I placed the girl layer underneath the garden layer and then masked out the garden to see through to the girl below. It didn’t occur to me when I was creating this composite how difficult it was going to be masking through all the flowers, plants and the structure of the boat to see through to the girl so I zoomed in as close as I could get and painted a black mask on my background image using a square brush. Seriously guys, using a square brush for fine masking has CHANGED MY LIFE. Pixels are square so why use a round brush!
Now THE most important thing in making your components match is to assess their saturation, colour and contrast. You don’t want one element too bright or too green because they’re going to stand out so use clipped adjustment layers to get each element to match. For this I use Phlearn’s fantastic ‘Checks’ method which is available as an action when you purchase a Phlearn Pro compositing tutorial and is a handy tool if you’re serious about compositing.
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When you’ve cut out your subjects and placed them on their new background you need to think about how to make them look like they belong there instead of just slapped on. There are a few ways to do this:
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Sara Byrne[/caption]
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'Under the waves' by Aneta Ivanova[/caption]
If I were forced to choose one photography technique to spend the rest of my life perfecting it would be the double exposure portrait. This involves taking one portrait and one scenery shot and smooshing the two together. The popularisation of this technique is attributed to Sara Byrne but for me it’s Antonio Mora who truly made it an art form. I also think the work of Aneta Ivanova is really beautiful. My biggest problem with this technique is that it has such a dull name—the double exposure portrait—so I’d really love to coin a new term for it. The ‘portscape’ perhaps?
For a long time I assumed this technique would be really hard to do. Anything with such utterly stunning results could never be simple, surely? Well fortunately I was wrong. Not only is this technique easy it’s also SO MUCH FUN.
In either case you’ll need to shoot the portrait first. Your second image will show through in the areas where your first image is darkest. Therefore it’s best to shoot your portrait against a light background to retain the silhouette that will contain your second image, whether this be against a white sheet or a blown out sky. I shot my image in my garage against a white sheet. I used a Speedlite with a shoot through umbrella to spill light onto my face because I wanted less of the second image to be visible over my features. I kept my hair dark because I wanted more of the second image to show here.
Then you’ll need to shoot your second image although if you don’t have a multiple exposure capable camera, feel free to just use images from your back catalogue. I expected there’d be some exact science for capturing the precise lights and darks for your chosen images to match, and maybe there is, but because of the unpredictable nature of this technique I’m yet to put my finger on it. From my own experimentation I can tell you that flowers and buildings look the best and blue skies look the worst.
Shot in camera. I should have cleaned up the portrait backgrounds first but the grey backdrop allowed more of the second image to show through.[/caption]
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Cleaned up background[/caption]
Load your portrait image into Photoshop. Because the background of my image wasn’t a uniform white I had to do some clean up work so I used the magic wand (w) with contiguous turned ‘off’ to select my background. I turned this selection into a layer mask with the 'Add layer mask' button and then chose Select->Refine Mask to fine-tune the selection around my hair. Had I shot my portrait against a cluttered background then this selection process would have taken much longer. I created a ‘solid color’ adjustment layer filled with white and dragged this underneath the portrait layer. Now I had a perfectly white background behind my portrait. Next load your second image(s) in layers above the portrait. I usually select these images in Lightroom, choose ‘Edit in-> Open as layers in Photoshop’ and then from the resulting document I use the move tool (v) to drag the images one by one to my main portrait image. I’m sure there’s a better way but this is just my process.
Start playing around with your blending modes. I introduced these to you last week but to recap … Your blending modes live at the top of your layer’s palette in the dropdown box that says ‘normal’. Click the drop down menu and select each of the different blending modes until you find one that blends your images together best (a shortcut for this is to make sure the move tool is active (v) and then press Shift + or Shift – to cycle through the modes quickly.) The blending mode that worked best for me was usually ‘Lighten’. You will probably have to move your top image around so it fits to your portrait in a really nice way. I tried to line up aspects of my second image with my facial features.
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At this point you can get really fancy and start messing with things like levels and curves to change the contrast and colour of your images, masks to paint out anything you don’t want seen and duplicating parts of your second image to fill in areas that need more detail. But it’s totally up to you. For now I chose to spend more time on double exposures that just work, rather than forcing them to look better. Sadly the MacBook Pro I use for editing died during this process (happily it was saved ten days later) but I didn’t get to play around as much as I’d hoped to with this technique so I’m really excited about future experiments.
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How I shot The Idea
While it’s currently the height of summer in the only hemisphere that (supposedly) matters, where I live in Australia it’s so cold that the state I live in saw snow for the first time in 30 years. When faced with the prospect of driving 2.5 hours to photograph said snow OR hibernating under blankets, I […]
Using special effects can instantly transform an ordinary photo into a magical scene, and they’re not nearly as complex to create as it seems. Traditionally artists use bright, glowing light to signify magic or special powers but if you set off fireworks or bring out your glowsticks during the day you’re not going to impress […]
Photoshop brushes are a brilliant way to add interest to your photos but did you know you can use brushes on layer masks? Say, for example, you want to create a bird made of fire, you could take a picture of fire, add a black layer mask to it and then using a bird-shaped brush […]
One of Photoshop’s coolest features is the ability to customise and import different brushes. Until now you might only have used Photoshop’s standard round brush to paint masks that hide and reveal layers. But if you spend some time with the brush panels you’ll discover that using different brushes not only makes your work easier but will give […]
A little known fact about me is that I’m a bit obsessed with miniatures. There’s just something about dioramas, terrariums and the work of artists like Thomas Doyle, Slinkachu, and Lori Nix that thrill me beyond explanation. Because of this I went through a fun phase of photographing Smurfs and other toys around my house. But […]
HDR is photography’s most controversial technique because when overused it produces garish results capable of making your eyes bleed. Cameras are limited in the tones they can capture, meaning if you expose to get detail in the shadows, your highlights will blow out, or if you expose to get detail in the highlights, the […]
Compositing gives photographers the magical power to change the weather. Most people crave a sunny sky but for conceptual and landscape photographers the more colour and cloud in the sky the better. We go to so much effort to make a scene beautiful and interesting and are often let down by those bright, washed out […]
I’ve been serious about photography for about five years now but even before that I always had a camera within reach. As a result I have over 80,000 photos in my Lightroom catalogue that I thought would never see the light of day, and the really exciting thing about compositing is that I can now […]
The word compositing has a boring textbook definition that in a nutshell means “how the magic happens”. Compositing made it possible for Harry Potter to fly around a Quidditch pitch, for Spider-Man to swing between buildings, and for men to walk on the moon. (Just kidding.) (Or am I?) By combining elements from different pictures […]
If I were forced to choose one photography technique to spend the rest of my life perfecting it would be the double exposure portrait. This involves taking one portrait and one scenery shot and smooshing the two together. The popularisation of this technique is attributed to Sara Byrne but for me it’s Antonio Mora who truly […]
