Lessons

Lesson Info

Soccer Shoot: Test Shots & Rough Composite

for this I'm also going to pop the camera into manual focus because I don't want to have to try toe auto focus on james while he's jumping so we're just going to pop this over into manual focus and then I'm gonna have you jump a couple of times james and then we're going to do a rough composite so well probably jumped two or three times and then I'll just pop in the better shops maybe a little break cool and with this we talked over the break about like bringing in a soccer ball and actually like giving him a prop which we are gonna wind up shooting the soccer ball separately but we're gonna try it without the soccer ball and see how realistic that looks and then we're going to try bringing one in so yep I'm ready whenever you are james I'll capture it awesome all right let's try one more man awesome already okay let's do one more if you don't mind so cool all right cool james you could take a short break and we're gonna be bringing these into photo shop all right so you guys can see m...

ost of that work was done before like the hard work and before we really asked anything of our model and the shots like because he's jumping in the air and kicking and james is actually a soccer player which helps out a lot they already look amazing like we've done so much of the work yeah come on come on look we've done so much of the work ahead of time that by the time that's our first three shots and like if I was forced to we could probably have used even the first one so really really cool alright I'm quick in studio which which of the three the second one yeah this one here okay really cool there we go and bringing the beautician helps you know helps to find the face a little bit better and so now we're going to bring this into in a photo shop so I don't do just right click on this and we're going to go to show in finder okay and then I'm gonna take the cr two and right click on that and we're gonna say open with photo shop cc two thousand fourteen so if you guys want to just you know if you want to bring your images in a different way into photo shop there is many many different ways to do that this is just with this particular broadcast the easiest way that I've found it do it okay so here you could do some adjustments if you wanted to but we're just going to hit we're gonna hit open and see how this looks all right and then the same is yesterday we're going to do a really quick job cutting james out here and then we're going to see like do we need to make any any adjustments all right so we're going to use the move tool and just shift click and drag from one image over to the other one is going to ask us if we wantto do our convert the color profile I'm okay with that all right there we go so let's go ahead and hit for full screen and now we want to cut out james from the background there we go and we can say we captured it in full frame so he's going to look we won't have to scale him up or down at all which is exactly what we want so I'm going to start off using our marquee tool basically they cut out as much of this is possible again like the selection tools that we're using we're gonna be using select color range and things like that but if I can start off just using things like a marquis tool to get as much cut out as possible it's just going to make my job easier and it's going to make the other selection tools a lot easier as well okay so we're going to select that out I'm going to just click on her lady mask and then hit command I invert that out all right we're going to zoom in here and then clicking on our layer I'm going ghetto to select and then down here to color range just like we did yesterday and they were going to click here on the green and we could see it's actually a pretty even exposure from one side to the other now you'll see areas like this this is like the shadow on the green screen so if I need a select that out I'll just gonna hit this plus I drop her and I'm gonna click on that as well there we go and I'll just hit the plus I drop her on that as well so we should see pretty well and remember we had some really great questions about hair cutting out here yesterday but we are going to be able to use the channels method to get a really fine selection of the hair so for right now this is we're still in the middle of the photoshoot right I don't want to waste a bunch of james's time like this is I would actually do this during a photo shoot so I would usually say like okay you did a great job you know take a break you know like hang out with hang out with the rest of the crew will call you back in five minutes you can look at what this actually going to be like usually gets you know the subjects and like oh cool this is gonna be amazing on dh then we'll start shooting again so usually with these composite shoots all shooting like ten different small segments rather than try to get the whole thing in one segment all right so we're going to hit okay it's gonna turn that area into a selection which is the background the green I'm gonna click here on my lamb asks so the green is selected we're gonna hit shift delete and now I'm gonna fill that with black so there we go let's go ahead and take our sketch out of there and then we had some great questions about removing uh things like lights dancing so we're just going to zoom in all right a couple times and you're going to see there is a green fringe but this is what I would call a rough comp or a test calm so I'm not really that concerned all right and to move these lights sense we're just going to use a lasso tool and I'm just going to click there and fill this with uh black on our later mask and just do this because this is the only area that I really need to get you know there we go fill that with black as well all right we'll go over here and this isn't even touching a shoe so I well I could have taken care of that with a marquee tool but not a big deal to do this with the last two old russian right command elite will fill with your uh background color and control sorry options elite will fill with your background with your four brown color where you going to sit shift elite and fill with any color you choose all right cool so here we have basically this is our image as a rough composite so what I want to do now is basically I want to work with his image and see like does this work right like do I need to actually change anything and at this point in time we talked before about working with perspective like matching the right perspective if you guys remember the image that I have the giant ego where I matched what was going on in the box to what was going on in the room this is basically what I would do I would I would bring it in here and say like ok does this actually work does this match and if it does we're good to go and if it doesn't I need to continue to make mohr and more adjustments as as we go along okay so I'm going to open this up to questions in our studio audience as I kind of make suggestions some adjustments and actually try to make this work so kind of looking at this image I think we're going to need to make it a little bit smaller you know maybe hang a little little bit more to get some get some attention going on there all right do we have any suggestions from our in studio audience is so what I could do to help this looks uh a little bit more like it's in the right perspective and uh actually looks like it's in the scene maybe coming at a slightly lower angle okay so they move the camera to laurie I getting the camera little lower alright good idea I'm going to bring this in and let's try like a slightly different crop to see like you know is that going to work with my crop tool I'm going to change my preferences and I'm going to bring the opacity of the background up to one hundred so I don't actually have to apply the crop to see what it's gonna wind up looking like I could just move this around and changed capacity all right so coming from a lower angle yeah I think that would actually make him look like he was a little bit higher in the air let's see that our crop there another couple things really really big hint here all right you guys ready for it look at your image in black and white when you're working with a composition and you're trying to figure out is this gonna work often times the things that might throw you off or like your color is it's too saturated is it the wrong color range or something like that so if I make an adjustment layer I'm going to go up to my channel mixer and I'm gonna hit monochrome so I'm gonna click on this in black and white and what I find a lot of the time is this really helps to answer a lot of questions as like you know why why doesn't it work or why why it does work the big thing here is if your image looks great in black and white I think you've got a really good chance of it looking good in color if it doesn't work in black and white chances are it's not gonna work in color as well so when I'm bringing in especially for these rough coms I'm bringing them in in black and white and then just kind of looking at what they're what they're actually going to look like in black and white versus color yeah just the rim light underneath him is a little confusing because like we talked about that before it kind of makes you feel like there's isn't just the fringing you're right it is it is a little bit confusing and that's kind of coming up from our from our crash pad so we can see this is actually like a bit of red right because we can see that red is actually hitting our subject let's go ahead and click on her layer mask this is a little bit confusing so I'm gonna go to select we're going to go down to refine mask and I'm gonna do just basically the same thing we did yesterday I'm gonna bring up our feathering and then I'ma shift the edge in just a little bit and this should help make our composite look a little bit more a little bit more refined all right let's bring up our furthering a little bit that's a great great comment jessica okay but you're totally right this like red glow down there see when we haven't visible in black and white you don't see that it's red but it might be too it might be too light so that's a question do we need to take care of that on set or can we take care of that in photo shop so let's see what we look like if we just grab like a quick curves adjustment layer and clipped it to our subject so again this is only affecting our subject like it doesn't help to darken this image up a little bit and we can use arm asking to make this either visible all right in this case I think it actually might help to darken it up just a little bit especially if we do I'm gonna invert the layer mask on that all right and then I'm gonna pay white here on the bottom part of this and that's just gonna like dark and down the lower sides of this so I can still keep his face like if I need to it's just going to kind of dark and down the lower sides of that if if we need to do that all right now let's take a look att like moving our grass in our stadium so these air other questions like I want to know basically what I'm in this stage can I completely fix that like do I have to make any adjustments here or can I make these can I fix these things just in photo shop and if if I can make adjustments here that's going to take away work that I have to do in photo shop also go ahead and do it but if it's something like like we talked about the grass in the perspective right so if I bring my cd um let's just say I bring my stadium down a good bit and then I bring my grass down a bit as well all right let's bring our lower sitting down as well like does that look more real it kind of does right so that's a really good thing to know is that maybe I don't have to change my camera angle maybe I just move my grass and move my stadium so I want all these pieces to be able to move around as much as possible all right so I do I I think you're right I think that the camera angle didn't even change do we still think we need to keep the put the camera a little bit lower what do we think yes looked up I think it's really cool because we are kind of like looking up so let's go ahead and lower a camera but just like as a start without and again we've done we've really done no special effects in this image we've done almost nothing like you know cool to the image we've basically just got you know we don't have a soccer ball in here we're gonna be doing some really amazing things on day three adding like motion blur and making it look like the stadium is kind of like blurring out towards towards james things like that you know and the other question is like our grasses into light if we want to darken our grass down let's just grab a curved adjustment layer and we can make our grass a bit darker and you know that kind of looks cooler too so you know just to be a couple of things like that was gonna help us answer yeah just go so tone that red that's reflecting up green and it would be believe we can do that we can do that so that's a huge reason why I look at these images in black and white to work to look at because I want to look at is it is that right what's going on with my lights like for instance the light here on his shin shin passed shin guards she goes okay I played soccer when I was like ten years old light hair on his shin guards I want this to be a little bit lighter so is that something that I need to adjust my lights but like see his leg is pretty light here right so I'm thinking like okay maybe I don't need adjust that on with lights if I could take care of that with the curves just layer if I just bring that brighter here and then bring in a layer mask and painted light like I was able to take care of that in photos because there already was a light there I was just making it a little bit brighter because we've got our light right here and then our light right there so you're right looking at the image in black and white it helps this kind of look at all of our lights and then if I were to take this off obviously this red isn't right but I can go up to my hugh saturation adjustment layer I can go down here to reds okay and then I want to choose my target red so I'm going to choose my eyedropper and I'm actually going to go to this red that's in his skin there as a quick test and here's a really good tip right now I still don't know exactly the range of red that I'm affecting right it's just this lighter down here but that's not really that helpful but if I drive my saturation way up and oftentimes I'll bring up my huge well it shows us that now I'm actually affecting all of those reds but I don't want to fight the reds that are on the skin so I'm actually going to take this little cider down here and I'm gonna move this over the left or over the right and it's going to affect different areas of red so now I'm affecting that area of red that's actually reflecting what's on the grass there sorry what's on the what's on the mat and now I'm able to bring this and I can change my hugh on just that area red to reflect what's going on here in the grass and then of course I wantto mass this out so it's not affecting areas like his face and I'm doing this very quick like day three is photoshopped day right this is just a really quick example of something that you can do like as a rough cut because at this point I just want to see like is this going to work like the saturation on my entire subject james sorry is just too bright is well so at this point I want to see like is this going to work do what do I need to adjust some things to make this a little bit more believable the other thing that I'm looking at two is like my camera place innit so right now I'm photographing james from like straight on but you know maybe I wanted maybe I want to angle my crash pads a little bit so he's kind of kicking towards the camera is right now it's a little bit flat right he's just kind of like kicking right to the side so let's go ahead and make those changes this is all the stuff that like it's so helpful to be able to composite thes image images while we're on set because we can make all these changes and and actually fix our image while we're creating it so let's do that I'm going to lower the camera angle let's angle yet let's try angling like this first that's a great idea and then we'll shoot some with the other angle all right there we go all right there we are and actually do you mind if I change is just a bit we're gonna have all right a little bit less of a dramatic angle here all right there we go let's try let's try a shot like that and then you khun um kick yeah I guess let's do the same direction you were doing before if that's all right right and if you want to just if you wouldn't mind standing on the crash pad about where you're gonna land I'm gonna refocus the camera here okay and we're good to go so whenever you're ready and I'll capture you in there all right e I was a little bit late on that one my fault all right let's look at those in my room so with some of these I'm also noticing that were actually able to capture james a shadow on the mat so if I need to I can actually take the shadow from this photo and use it on the background and if that is going to work like I wanted to we're going to enhance this a little bit here in the studio all right so here are the shots we could say we were a little bit on the low side with that one but the shadows on the ground if I need to I can take those shadows and I can use those in the shot all right so again you can see there really is a pretty big change in angle and in direction there all right our kind of want to use this shot and see if we can use this in in the actual image is this a good one for you guys all right so again we're going to try the same thing I'm going to go a little bit faster on this one because we need to continue um we need to continue to move on all right and with this kind of good with these kind of composite it's it's really valuable to be able to do this sort of thing during the photo shoot so usually I'll do this as quickly as I possibly can but making all these changes during the photo shoot you know by the time you get into photo shop and you know you're going to be editing for a few hours and it's going to be a final image you know that it's gonna work right it's a lot better than just having shooting this totally blind and then the next day trying to make it all work together in photo shop because it's just a giant question mark at this point if we can make sure that it's going to be right here during the photo shoot it's just going to ensure we have a better final product in the end all right do we have any questions while I while I do this is kind of a no brainer thing a little bit I'd be happy to answer some questions yes sir so we have a lot of questions about focussing where where your focus points are do you pre focus this includes from yesterday and for today what's your best practices ok good question um yeah the answer is yeah I so earlier you just saw that I actually had james kind of like stand in the place that I actually wanted him to tow land on so I've got the camera in manual focus but I went ahead and changed my focus point auto focus and I'm in a honestly I don't even know what mode that I don't know what focus mode this is but I set the focus point on james's leg and then I did an auto focus and I'm shooting it what is it eph what we shooting guys f eleven yeah I'm shooting at f eleven at thirty two millimeters so just kind of like zooming into this image like pretty much everything in my frame should be sharp at f eleven at thirty two millimeters so what I had james dues I had him like stand on the point where I'm actually going to wind up where I'm actually going to photograph him and then I did my focus if you guys don't notice this shirt in areas like this are slightly less there's slightly less bright so if we are going to want him going with this perspective I'll probably spend a little bit of time readjusting the beauty dish and making sure that that does light areas like this or if we wanted to light areas like you know give the front of a shirt a little bit of a rim light we could then bring in another light and have that like basically just get his shirt if we wanted to is well but let's go ahead and go into photo shop all right I'm I'm cool for another question if you want I'm just gonna do the exact same thing I did last time great question from one of our regulars michelle be does aaron find paying attention to facial expressions and muscle tension in the body plays a big part in believability and if so what do you tell your subjects to how to achieve this okay yeah totally that's a great question so at this stage of the photo shoot I don't plan on actually being able to use any of these photos like this this is what I call like the testing stage or like the lighting stage so at this stage I'm really not looking at at anything like that I'm looking at lighting and I'm looking at is my composite going to work so at this stage the answer is no I'm not thinking about that at all but when it comes to actual you know the actual photo shoot yes most definitely I'll you know we're going toe again that's the time when I would normally crank up the music because you know people have you know like oftentimes I'll tell my subjects to like you know scream during a photo shoot to like something like this because it it helps out like bring out that actual emotion but I'm not you know I don't want to ask someone to scream it would make it even more awkward like if there's music going on and everyone's like really pumped up that that's when you tend to get like those real reactions from from people but like if like right now is just like tell james to scream as you kick like that's that's gonna make him feel weird and I'm not I'm just not going to do that to someone so at this point in time and he's already making great facial expressions as well so at this point in time I'm not so much concerned with that but when it came when it comes time to the actual photo shoot yeah I'm going to be looking at his face and muscle tension and things like that a lot more but it is this point in time I'm just kind of making sure like my lighting is right and it's gonna wind up working questions cool yet for another one yes totally this one's from carlos question I imagine that all of these techniques can be used on product photography do you use them on flying meals for example flying what meals meals feels used flying meals like food flying like a plate of food sort of flying through the air I've never photographed that but I just thought it was a funny question yeah if that's if that's what you're photographing then yeah totally you should do that um yes you could use this on flying meals thank you okay jessica I was wondering if you had any other suggestions for backgrounds fur sports photographs of stadiums together any other common ones or ideas yeah totally I think really going with whatever whatever it is you have and you know personally I love like really alternative ideas and things like that like you know if I saw siri's of sports portrait's where you know they were done on the moon or something like that personally that would interest me more I'd be like that's awesome you know I want to see more of those but it's it totally depends on your clientele and it depends on your audience right like if if you were doing this sort of stuff like let's see we have a question from someone who was doing senior portrait earlier if I had if I had a setup where I had a couple of different backgrounds and I knew that okay I've got my green screen setup let's say I had all this setup right I spent the day doing this and then I brought in like twenty seniors to do their senior portrait and then I taught one of my like assistance or rita cher's how to do this in photo shop and I could put twenty different seniors on a backdrop like this and then sell prints toe all of their parents like totally I would do that right but you wouldn't want to put the background on the moon it would make a lot more sense to do you know something a little bit more traditional or you know if your client wanted something that was like a little bit more out there then yeah I'd go for that if it's a personal project than most definitely recommend doing something that really does interest you I'm all for that so yeah when it comes with when it comes to backgrounds I would say like make sure make sure you're doing whatever is appropriate for for for the job or for the project and that's usually it's usually I find when you get the best results good question um all right so if you see what I'm doing right now I actually used a really quick channels method to cut out his shadow and then I've got this on a new layer and then just changes from a normal layer down to a multiply layer so I'm actually going teo I'm gonna test on if I want to actually use his shadow on the backdrop and the original idea was to have him you know be doing a horrible job cutting him out right now by the way um god even worse than horrible the original idea was to have him be completely in the air but we've got some of these shadow elements now and if I want to include those shadows in my actual image I could totally do that like if I wanted to have him look like he was almost you know like on the ground so we can see this shadow from that I'm adding right there let's just bring that below my actual subjects right there this is the actual this is les with james on and this is the actual shadow that I took from the crash pad is well it's a really rough and you know not that good version of it right now but it just kind of like gives us an option if I did want to bring in the shadow from from this image what I would do is probably cut out a piece of like I get a chroma key background like a green green background just paper and I would place it over top of the crash pads and I would have him land on that but you'd have to do that every single time you wanted him to actually jump so I'm not sure that we're gonna do that today but that's just kind of expanding those options right like you can put a piece of scene with paper on a crash pad and then use the backgrounds for that all right cool so just kind of like looking at this image and seeing seeing what we're goingto make work so this is again this would be a little bit closer to the actual ground does this work if it does cool we'll go with it if not I know I need to capture him a little bit higher in the air all right and the other thing that we're going to do here is I want to compare this to my original image where the camera was a little bit higher right so we're just going to pop this into black and white because it makes it easier and I don't have to look at it I don't have to look a tte if my color is inconsistent or anything like that all right where does this look right up there down there up there looks better huh all right cool so if he was again it doesn't look like he's landing on the crash pad here so that's that's kind of like why this looks like a ground plane even though it shouldn't be one so let's just compare this one to that one all right I think the one where he's in the air is a little bit better what do you think you know what I'm gonna put this further down so we'll have the shadow in there and everything like that all right so now we can compare that would actually makes it also makes the image of james just a little bit darker so I'm gonna grab my curves adjustment layer option command g to clip that adjustment layer and we're just gonna bring this a little bit darker which tells me that I can probably lower if I wanted to I could probably lower my fill light but honestly I don't I don't mind describing a crab adjustment layer and making a little darker to match the image I would rather shoot with mohr fill light and then darken that down in photo shop than not have that light to begin with because light making things lighter in photoshopped tensed you tend to lose a lot of information because darks don't really contain a lot of information with especially this is a candid five demark three shooting with like a nikon d eight hundred would probably kept mohr information in the dark's but when I'm shooting I'm shot cannon for years and I I shoot a little bit lighter and then darken it down in photo shop all right so now we can kind of see like does is that working for us or is that right thie other question is like if we did like this right like maybe we could have maybe you could do something like this kind of flip that horizontal and maybe we could have both in there like maybe you know one version of james is hitting for you know um yeah maybe one of these virgins is behind the other one and this is in this case it's really obvious that it's the same person but if we wanted to shoot him you know facing the other way or something like that which we may do in just a little bit we'll be able to get away with quite a bit where you know maybe it's maybe it's a different person or it would at least look like it's different person we could change the color of the of the jersey and things like that as well so there are a ton of options again when just remember when you're compositing that your composition and everything it happens here in photo shop not in not in the camera so you really do have these options if you'd like right I guess you'd have to be either buried in that are smaller than that that's the one trick is like you have to make sure you match this perspective and then the other cool ideas like what if we wanted to create a montage where like you know this was a senior portrait shoot that you did and we wanted like to show multiple kicking versions in the same photo like this would be a no updates of that cheesy you know image where you have like the baseball player and in the corner you have they're like tortured and like fuzzy around the edges you don't talk about this would be like an update to that if we if we did do something like this probably make it a little bit better than this but just like some some cool options here to look at um so alright in studio audience what do you think we have him in the air or something like this on the ground in the air all right so something like something I would like that looks like a pretty good alright on dh then our our angle change um let's see bringing that on let's try one more change we're going to keep the camera where it is I'm going to change the angle of the crash pad so they're kicking out towards us now yep exactly just like that and and then we're going to do another test shot here and just make sure that's good do we have any other suggestions so this is this will be like our third our third set up with our lights and you mean I'm day onset usually on the show there's music going and I'll usually do this ten different times especially when it's something like this and I needed to match perfectly brings up another quick good point if you are working with talent let's say I was photographing like a celebrity soccer player david beckham or something like that there's no way that I would actually make david duel this stuff I would find someone who looks relatively similar and I would set all this up beforehand and make sure everything's good to go so that by the time david gets on set he's only gotta jump two or three times and then he can go do something else because those people are going to be busy so if you are shooting someone who's you know a celebrity was gonna have really limited time don't make them do all this make sure you have someone else take care of all this stuff do we have any other suggestions for the image before we do this shoot so any other corrections or adjustments you want me to make now could you go anyone from at home we're in good shape folks asked about the flash duration laceration okay that's not something we've talked about yet it's not something we've talked about but it is a really good question that's something we want to definitely cover because we are photographing james in the air and we want him to be as still as possible basically well just back up a little bit fat flash duration is basically the amount of time that these flashes produced light so a lot of the time these flashes and different manufacturers create their flashes differently but for the most part flashes they produce a certain amount of light first searching amount of time and usually at higher powers they're not actually producing mohr light that light is just on for a slightly longer period of time so it looks like from the camera's point of view it looks like there's mohr light because more light is being admitted but that's a time thing because the camera's sensor is staying open and capturing light throughout time so if a camera sensor is open for one second and these lights amid light for a half a second that's going to be a certain amount of time but if these lights amid light for a fourth of a second that's going to be half a much like even if they were emitting the same amount of light through the entire duration does that make sense okay cool now we have to take that half a second and quarter of a second down to a really short period of time a lot of these flashes are producing light at like one or five thousandth of a second so they're producing the amount of light in a very very short amount of time now that is really great when it comes to freezing our subject in the air so if he's jumping in our flashes produce light in a very very short amount of time that's basically the only life that's going to be entering my camera because the rest of the set is relatively dark so the amount of light that's coming into the camera is from the flashes and it's only going to be visible it's only to be present for a very short amount of time so if light is only they're for a very short amount of time that's all that's going to hit the camera and it's going to look like we're freezing action so the shutter speed doesn't have to be extremely short because the amount of light that's present is only present for us extremely short amount of time that don't make sense okay it's like really hard to explain which brings me to my next point that's going to vary from a manufacturer to manufacture and from light to light I actually don't know the specs on these were using pro photo d ones right now I don't know the spec sirs I think it's like a t one and a t five time is that right yeah you can you can go to the website and see their flash durations I know when the so policy buff which is another company we use they have their einstein's when they came out they boasted like extremely short flash duration which is really good for freezing action and that's why I bought a studio set of feinstein so we could freeze the action but I will notice that if I'm using einstein's with alien bees the alien bees have a much longer flash oration so the alien bees will actually cause some blurt will cause motion blur because they emit light during a longer period of time so if you want to make sure it's consistent make sure that all the lights you're using or the same brand the same manufacturer or at least have the exact same flash duration on dh I know that pro photos they're good I know that the einstein's have a sport mode sorry it's an action mode so they have ah portrait mode sorry color you're right its color and action those air the two modes on the einstein's color is going to make sure that the color output from the flashes is consistent every single time and the action is going to make sure that it's going to try to produce the shortest amount of time where light is visible for flesh