Lessons
Class Intrduction
05:40 2Milky Way Image: Combining Exposures
04:32 3Milky Way Image: Simple Selections And masking
06:37 4Star Stacking: Combining Layers With Lighten Blending Mode
09:09 5Star Stacking: Layer Masks
05:06 6Car Trails: Merging Multiple Exposures
09:19 7Car Trails: Fixing Uneven Sky
08:38 8Light Painting: And Layering
03:12Lesson Info
Class Intrduction
Hey, everybody, I'm Tim Cooper from National Parks at night, and I am super thrilled to be here. I really love night photography, and I really love photo shop. I've been teaching for over 25 years, but night photography over the last decade has really re inspired my teaching and my photography, and blending all that together with photo shot is just amazing. So what I want to do here today is to guide you through some of the really common techniques that I use in photo shop to enhance my images. As always, we want to create the best image we can out in the field, um, and then make it better. There's, uh, the idea, and a lot of people are saying Well, that we'll just do this in photo shop and I really disagree with that. And the main reason is because it's so much more fun enhancing an image than it is trying to fix something that you messed up out in the field. So as we go along through this, I'll talk to you a little bit about my shooting techniques and what happened on the field on. T...
hen we'll get into the Photoshopped techniques that are taking, hopefully a good image and really making a great. So let's go ahead and get started. Some of the stuff that I want to show you today is how to really enhance your Milky ways. Milky Ways aerial, uh, prominent in the summer months. And they're gonna be out in the sky and for shooting them, You got to use really, you know, really super fast lenses. And you've got to go pretty, pretty long periods of time. 30 seconds. But sometimes the Milky Way doesn't always pop out the way we want it to weaken. See it with our eyes. But we can't necessarily get it a strong on the film. And so I'm going to show you guys how to do. Ah, little bit of that. Next is ah, star trails. These are a ton of fun, and there's a couple different ways to do them. Um, one way is just toe open up your shutter for a really long time again. Wide open aperture like F four. Um, just let that camera run at a low. I s 01 eso 100 or 200 and, uh, open that up for minutes, half an hour, even an hour, and you get these star trails racing across your sky. But what I want to show you how to dio is how you can create star trails from multiple exposures. And the reason that I like to do it that way is because it gives me the ability to go in and paint with my flashlight and give her several different tries. So, like on this image, for example, this is probably about 30 different exposures that maybe not quite that maybe, maybe exposures. But during those exposures I was able to go in and paint the rock from the left and painted from the right. Try painting the foreground in a couple of different ways, and then in the end, what I can do is I can pick and choose from the different lighting that I used and blend them in with the sky. Same thing with car trails. You know, in situations like this, we don't always have even car trails running across our scene, and that, in this case, is to do with a lot of city lights. The city light makes your exposures just a little bit shorter, so if I could have run this for five minutes, we've had plenty of car trails running up and down. Pennsylvania adhere. But in this case, I had a blend several different exposures together. Teoh create the final image. So we'll be talking about how to include car trails and and how to blend them together. And I also want to get into blending for light painting. So a lot of times, what I'll do is I'll make several different exposures. Like in this case, I think the exposure was about three minutes long, the base exposure because when I was right outside of Cleveland and there was a fair amount of light in the cities here in the city and kind of, uh, in the sky, and that kind of made my exposure shorter than I would have liked. So I didn't have the time to run around and paint every little object that I wanted to, um, So once again, I broke up the light painting, um, into several different exposures, and I'm gonna show you guys had a blend those together. Same thing here, a blend of probably about three different light painting exposures and two different exposures for the sky and then last, What I'd like to talk about is the moon. Now, photographing the moon is a ton of fun. Uh, and one of the best recipes for success is to photograph the moon while the sun is still up in the sky. That doesn't necessarily qualify for night photography in that case, but what that allows us to do is this case you can see the last of the setting Sun is hitting this mountain, and we have plenty of detail on the moon and this is a pretty natural photographed. The only photo shop work I did here was a little darkening down in this area and a little color in the clouds. But other than that, it is what it is. So when you're wanting to shoot the full moon, you generally want to shoot it two days before 2 to 3 days or one day before the actual full moon and you'll get a shot that looks like this. The last of the light is hitting them the terrain or your foreground. The moon comes up and the exposure can be made in one shot. But in other cases like this when the moon is high in the sky and its already nighttime. If you take a picture for the moon, you just get a black frame with a white moon in no detail. And if you brighten it up enough like this, then you're able to get detail in the foreground. But your moon loses detail, and we want to see a little bit of detail in that moon like I have here, so I'll show you guys how you can blend that together. So that's kind of the lesson plan for the day. Um, I think we should just get right into it.
Ratings and Reviews
Constantin Simion
Very good!!! Mr. Cooper presents simple Photoshop tools that can make a substantial improvement of the pictures in a way that everyone can understand.