Lessons

Lesson Info

Composite Shoot Images

so this is what I was playing around with last night um this is erin and her little baby boy was right boy right blake what's his name um and what I pretty much did was just process the image so which images this one thirty three let's go out and find that concept shoot there it is okay so these are the raw images that we shot yesterday okay and so I just kind of looked through all these and what what drew me to the one I selected which is this one here was aaron's eyes okay and the way she was looking really intrigued me okay so this has all been I worked I fucks with it a little bit in camera ross so of course you don't hear you always have to touch things when you go back to it go ahead and open it again and so all I did was some basic retouching and photo shot okay and liquefy so I'll start off with what I didn't liquefy now what with the concepts to shoot the world is your oyster you could make this look however the heck you want okay with a concept shoot I'm going to make this wo...

man look rocket okay I'm going to slim her down and make her look like she just came out of vanity fair magazine okay so I wouldn't normally do this with a client so just keep that in mind okay but I am going to really ring her in because I want this to be a full on concept shoot that all you're drawn to is mama okay elongate her neck and that's pretty much what I did with her and liquefy gonna run through this just really quickly so you can kind of see the process okay then what I did as I re touched her face I went in here and just touched up the skin I used my dodge tool brightened up the catch lights gave her reflection cast light because I wanted that kind of ethereal look in her eyes I wanted that kind of glazed over appearance because it is a fine art image after all so I'm just using the uh the burn dodging burned basic dodging burn kind of being destructive on my images so now I'm going to the burn tool and I just made the outline of her iris a little more intense to give her eyes more of that haunted appearance okay I retouched the skin a little bit I'm not going to go into the huge details of what I did because it's just boring stuff I fixed the feet the color in the feet what's were like we did yesterday I liquefied baby a little bit more to make him a little bit more compact and tight I guess what I really just kind of wanted to show you was that I didn't do much to this image okay to make it have that fine art field and that's the point that I want to make to you is that you don't have to do a bunch of compositing to make something look amazing all I want to show you it's kind of the blurring effects that I did and then also the the textures that I applied and that's really all I did so I pressed command j to copy my layers okay and then all I did on this second layer was apply a gazi and blur we're gonna ask you a question and get mike to sort out okay awesome so I need to let go of my computer here to just let my fix okay then we'll just ask you a perfect let's do a few questions like that julia do you know that I have one but I wanted to give you tips okay so when we're talking about using stock images yes rita in the chat rooms are she's asking if there any legal issues when you're using stock photography with your own images as long as you're buying the stock photography you're totally fine because you're buying the license to use it so that's I mean some of the images if you could get expensive quick I mean some of my images that I've created from stock of cost me a couple hundred bucks because it's costing like fifty dollars an image to go in there and get good stock photography so just be wary of that to some it's a little cheaper to photograph your own stuff whatever once well there's something you need that's unique I mean like noise von stein in germany the castle I'm not just gonna go fly to germany teo teo get a picture of response time but I can buy it on stock so as long as here that's what stock is for and you can take those stock images and do anything you want to him and for people who are a little bit newer to this or maybe haven't tried that what were your favorite places to look for that sort of thing I love shutter stock and I stock there are even places where you can get stuff for free like deviant art there's a lot of artists out there who makes stuff that you can use for free so just look around just make sure you're doing it legally and kindly credit as always and you know remember that good theft bad theft thing just be nice to people and if you do something cool with their stuff show it to him and let him use it okay so we're good let's go backto go backto la la land here so yeah so what I did was is I just thank you mike you're my hero I basically he is the nicest guy by the way an incredible artists as well so I just applied to gazi and blurted this image that's all I'm doing at this time but remember I'm doing it on a second layer so with that gazi and blurred applied now I can go in and put a layer mask on it so I'm gonna go down to my layer mask icon down here at the bottom select my brush okay make it a bit bigger I'm at forty percent of my brush right now which is pretty good and then I just start slowly painting in on mama I want mama and baby to be super crisp now it's a little too blurred here so I'm just gonna lower the a pass ity of my layer to give it that ethereal look that I want on the on the mom's tool button and on her hair but not necessarily on her face so I just applied a lovely softening ethereal effect to it that's all I did smash my layers go ahead and apply my action go ahead and do that okay and then obviously I had liquefied already and then all I did was start bringin textures okay so I have a few texture I have someone here my library go ahead and open bridge a little bit larger let's go ahead and go into um let's see it's under studio so um I have a bunch of toe I'd buy textures from people you can check them yourself but I will often by a texture and just start grabbing fun textures and apply him over the top it's really kind of up to you and what you want to use I generally use a texture that's the similar warmth and tone of my image I think for this one I used maybe I used mindy what you could do is basically just take this image drag it over into photo shop and it will place it on your photo shop screen and then you can just put it right over the top of mama double click to set the texture so here you can see I have the texture of the top now here's the fun part this is blending modes I can go in and put in overlay mode which is a little intense soft light is one of my favorite modes soft light gives me that texture ingrained into the background then if I don't like the texture on mama I could go ahead and mask it take it off of just mama and baby maybe off her skin a little bit reduce the opacity slightly to give it that full on look that I want that ethereal vintage appearance that's all I did to this image less is more you don't have to go nuts so I really want you to understand that even if you don't have intense technical skills on photo shop you can create something very artistic okay your client will go googly googly over mean she's going to see this and hopefully lovett ok especially five years from now when her baby is older she's gonna look at that and especially with the look in her eyes and it's so thought provoking isn't it you're like what is she thinking what is she thinking about her baby and just giving birth the softens air so much femininity in the image and so much meeting as faras the feminine form goes here and about motherhood that this just sings to my whole journey of doing mother child art okay you know what was my mother thinking when she held me as a newborn those kinds of things so as an artist you will find sometimes happy accidents things will be serendipitous and you'll be like how that works totally do what I wanted to dio sometimes you'll have a visionary like that's what I'm doing I don't care what it costs I'm gonna do it and sometimes we'll just play around with whatever ingredients you got in the pantry and see what happens okay okay let's get on to the composite any questions before him of our world I'm navigating through my mess any questions on the composite yeah do you run the same actions throughout all of your images to create the same look in your brand or yes on we started doing that about a year ago and that's kind of why twenty my style changed a little bit about a year ago and you will find something that you love and a lot of people when you're first starting out you experiment with everything you're like oh this is pretty that's cool that's just you exploring your style run with it don't don't beat yourself up for doing that but just know big picture rise that you're going to have to find a look that you love that's consistent their clients can rely on all the time this kind of stuff this is where you get to have fun you could do whatever the heck you want you could stay true to your style you could start playing around you could experiment that's the joy of being creative yeah I use the texture I do the multiply which makes it darker are there any rules you have like for a darker texture use the screen mode and for lighter textures use multiply depending on the image or is it just intuitive and dynamic it's just whatever works and sometimes I gotta play around and decide and sometimes I agonize over lee saw flight overly softly which one do I pick which one I mean I mean sometimes it's like you just let yourself going be like just check something you know I mean told agonize over it too much to kill yourself you start drinking vodka at nine in the morning if you do that okay so just let your stis whatever looks good try not to over analyze too much and we're artists we do this we're left brain right brain artists we use a camera so we're very technical people at the same time are right brains just tease us and play with us constantly so we're having this battle between left brain right brain and when you're in that technical moment we're like okay multiplayer screen both the player screen I don't know they both look good just pick one and go with it or save them both and let it sit for a minute and come back to it and see which one you like later oftentimes when you step away from the from the situation it will make your mind clear when you when you come back to it there's an internet question yeah julie a couple people love composite and annie all both wanted to know if you have any recommendations or suggestions for textures where to find them or you know actually I just downloaded I actually bought one of the creative live courses here I love created life too and who was it that had a really neat texture set oh um I'm really pretty blonde girl what's her name no it wasn't brooke it was she's like she has a british accent laura jade oh she's so pretty I want to look like her eyes darling cute little thing like he you just want to stare at her forever yeah she has a really cool texture set that I that I just downloaded which is really cool and brooke would be a good one to go to two shoes a master of composite or she does cool stuff really neat very her style she has I think does she have a neat texture set I haven't looked at her stuff yet I'm sure she does she would be a good one I think it really just a matter of finding someone who style you love and if they sell textures awesome jim cunningham is a painter and he does really cool backgrounds that you khun couple off of so you'll find people who create backgrounds for you mark bryant out of wyoming he for especially for the guys out there who want to do composites he doesn't really need backgrounds like show would go out and shoot hdr background so does joel grimes he does amazing composite work joel like rocks my socks off totally inspirational me not my style would never shoot like that but he has technical skills there's amazing and he makes it look so simple and he makes it easy so fine people like that who make it look relatively straightforward and don't put a lot into it but still get great results it's just like cooking you can overdo it with the spices you know cartman and tarragon don't quite go together so find someone who understands how to spice things well and simply and beautifully