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Shooting for Creative Photoshop

So when I was planning this class, we're trying to figure out what to teach today, they actually kind of gave me free rein to teach whatever I want, which is really nice. I like that, um and I was looking over what other people were teaching, like other topics that were being covered, and a lot of it was I mean, don't get me wrong like great content, but I didn't see much teaching of, like, creative part of photoshopping mean it's all creative, but how it plays such a fundamental role for us as photographers now, I mean, many people their entire styles are based on photo shop, so one of our creative live alums and one of my best friends, brooke, shade in, for example, you know, her work photo shop is absolutely integral to that, and I feel like people don't talk about it a lot when I was in college, which wasn't too long ago, but it was long enough ago that there were different really photo shop classes I did take, I had a degree in photography, business and political science, okay, so...

my photography degree now we learned all the traditional lighting and way had technically had photoshopped, but we really just learned, like, how to color correct and how to change levels and like some basic stuff, um and so I didn't really realize how much of a difference it could make in my career. So now photo shop before I do issue, I'm already thinking about what I do and photoshopped actually based my shoots around what I know is capable and there are a lot of different reasons why I shoot for photo shop so that's, what I want to talk about I was always taught that in the beginning photo shop is from fixing mistakes and blemishes. I mean, basically, you know, fix your levels, fixture white balance not at all that's, not how you use it all. I mean, of course I get it right in camera. But what happens if you want to have eight thousand flowers all up on a wall in a model floating in the middle of them? Okay, so clearly that's not possible and so of course you could do in photo shop, you can save yourself money and not have eight thousand flowers and not have to have a levitating model you, khun achieve it in post. So I want to talk about not just shooting for photo shop or creative photo shop in general, but mine the way the I shoot for photo shop, for example, I don't do that much compositing in the way that maybe you guys think of compositing um it's just not my style, but I'll show you how I still composites just a little bit different, so I kind of want to jump into that, so I'm going to do the five reasons that I shoot for photo shop and how it works in my career. I'm going to talk about them going to show you some videos of shoots and then I'm going to actually take it into photo shop and show you how I've done these different effects. All right? So here's, what we have the five reasons that I shoot for photo shop number one is a big one for a lot of us, his budget, you know, when you have these grand ideas that you want to achieve, but you definitely do not have the money to achieve it. So give me some examples of that convenience. Sometimes it is just easier, for example, two composite a model in front of a volcano than actually taking the model to the volcano number three would be creative lighting. I have taught a class here on creative live about creative lighting, but I love combining creative lighting and photo shopped to make things that couldn't happen in lighting actually exists and that's what you see a lot maybe in those clothes jewelry ads where the model is beautifully lit and then she has a beautifully no sparkling diamond that didn't happen all in camera at once that was achieved with multiple images. Number four is the impossible made possible, so that would be your levitating model a person ten times in the room at once, something like that. And then lastly, and this is a big one for me is style and design it's just part of my style, I have certain looks that air regularly achieved through photo shop, and so I'm going to jump into that, and I'm going to show you some sheets that I've done, either over the last year or the last couple years and a few behind the scenes videos and what I'm actually doing this class is not just purely photo shop, I'm going to show you the lighting diagrams I'm going to tell you about the gear that I used, and I would love questions. I'm more than happy to take questions, so this is the only class that you'll probably see this week that does address a little bit more of the shooting side as well, because it is shooting for photo shop so let's jump into number one, and I'm going to give you an example of a shoot. All right, so the concept of the shoot and this was called golden goddess, um, which is spelled wrong, but okay, golden got us so thie designer came to me and said, ok, I want to do this editorial and I want everything to be gold I want the model painted in gold head to toe about gold jewelry I wanted to just shimmer I wanted to look beautiful if you can find a way to maybe put her in a gold room if we could do something like that so running through my head is like, ok, painting a model gold and keeping it gold that is a lot of retouching I don't if anyone's ever tried painting but it clumps up, it makes wrinkles, it drips so that that's a disaster over the next thing I'm thinking is ok, well, a gold room so I went ahead and I was looking and I found some kind of gold gold material that's actually intended to put on cars I guess there's way that you can like, put linings on cars to make them look different, different metallics, but it was what I needed to build the set that I wanted here was going to be one thousand dollars and their budget for my set was nothing. So I'm like, ok, so I'm not gonna not going to come out of pocket for that, so what I knew that I could dio is that I could make a set much more inexpensively and then re touch it so let me tell you about the set that I use, and I definitely recommend you guys try this, that I love it and it's an expensive it could think it cost me maybe seventy dollars, so I went to an art supply store, but you could also go to home depot, and I bought what I bought was those large four by eight foot flats? Um, you could also get kind of the insulation, and they were not gold. In fact, they're just plain black, and then I went to michael's, or maybe you guys have a seymour, andi I bought metallic poster board and adhesive spray, and I sprayed those and glued them onto these two v flats and put them in a corner. No, I knew that if I had done it the expensive way, I could have something that was completely seamless, and it would be perfectly shiny. And if you look here, can you see this seems actually in that set, but I knew that I could pretty easily photoshopped out tied the next thing I really did not want to have to photo shop my model gold. I definitely don't wanna have to or didn't want to have to paint her gold, but I knew that I could do in photo shop. And so what I'm doing here is extremely simple and I think you guys will be pretty impressed so it made us list this gear again so you need two of these two four by eight foot foam core flats you need seventy eight pieces of the metallic poster board and this was lit with one stroke just one light and it doesn't matter what you have but what I used was a beauty dish so beauty dish is a fashion photographer is most commonly used light source what's great about it is it gives you a lot of contrast it defines the jolla and there's a lot of control but it's still forgiving it's not really harsh on the skin on dso I used white because silver is a little bit more harsh if you've seen me teach about lighting I talk about this if you have a light modifier that has silver, it pumps up contrast and what that translates to in a photo is if you guys were in photo shop and you've ever dragged the contrast lighter you're looking at someone's face let's say that they have wrinkles you drag the contrast lighter the blacks get darker meaning they're wrinkles look deeper okay well it's not usually desirable and then the same thing if somebody has oily skin you dragged that contrast lighter the highlights get brighter in their skin looks oil earlier so any time you have a silver lining maybe silver reflector dish or maybe it's a silver beauty dish or even one of those soft boxes with a silver interior it'll have more contrast it will be a little bit sharper so for this it was a single beat addition I'll show you what it looks like my one tip that if you wanted to try to remake this yourself would be that you don't want to have a neutral point in your photo like a white or like something that's clearly black or neutral gray because what we're going to do is we're going to mess with your white balance so let's check in with the chat rooms I do want to say frank yardwork bill that everybody love hearing from you uh what where can we find you online? You can find me on facebook at frank butler fury photography that's three words just search frank military photographer your last name forever be isn't boy e l l a f as in frank I o r e bola fury and actually just you know talking about the global element way have poland we have germany we have in the czech republic I mean this is truly a global audience joining us today very sorry, very fun all right, so here's what it looked like this is what it looks like to the camera's eye and so I said it's just those two flats together in one like all right so this is what the end images looked like this kind of look in this kind of feel and I knew what I could do in photo shop so that's why I didn't do it in reality so I have a video for you guys to watch you could take a look behind the scenes and see how it was done and what it looked like weii story oh okay so I'm just gonna open up that file and show you what this would look like and you'll be really happy because it's incredibly easy all right? So let's go into golden goddess so this is what this raw file is going to look like today I'm going to be working in photo shops sisi for everything that I dio typically though I actually start in light room that's where I you know my work begins and so I can sink so many different photos so I can do this one creative gold effect and then apply it to everything else all right so looking at this photo it is very cold and does not scream golden goddess to me but watch how simple I can warm the crap out of it I dragged it all the way to the right and you I mean do you wouldn't know any different you would think that the whole scene is warm and then I'm going to go ahead and increase the saturation of it it increased the vibrance a little bit. I mean that's pretty much all there is to it something really simple like that and so then it's going in and once it's opened up just cleaning up that background so oh, same peak for later. So what we do is we show you a couple of tools that I would use to clean up the background in this instance. Oh, it apparently opened a lot of files for some reason, just very strange. Let me open the one file up have no idea why. Um so for this editorial, by the way, the reason that I used light room and I went ahead and I created a preset is because every shot has to have that same field. When you shoot a series of images, you want them to feel united. So what I do is I create one preset applied to everything, all right? So when a duplicate my background and I'm going to zoom way in and I'm looking and I can see these little scenes and so the tool that I go to first over here on the left hand side when usually be the quickest in the simplest, who would be the spot healing brush and how the spot healing brush works is you make the brush just a little bit bigger than whatever you're trying to get rid off and you can click and drag it and you don't actually even have to give a sample point in other words photo shop is just like ok, what around this is what what's around this what should this be replaced with and actually figures it out for you? It doesn't always work, but let's give it a try and a tip that you might not know is when if you're following a line like this you're trying to get rid of a scene if you click and they hold the shift key, it'll draw straight lines where you click again so you don't have to click the whole way down the line and you also don't have to drag in case it's not you know, in case your hand isn't study such again so it click drag and click and drag something like that and so of course it's going to be a little bit of work going around the entire image like that but it's pretty simple if that didn't work and there's some cases where it wouldn't, um the other tool that I would go ahead and go to let's say maybe appear I go ahead and I try to sample and it messes it up okay? What I would do is I would then try the healing brush so the difference between the spot healing and the healing is for the healing brush yusa a sample point so you're not just saying get rid of this you guess and you figure it out photo shop you're saying these air the pixels that I like so what you do is you hold the altar option key and you say ok, this is the color I want this to be and you can click and drag and so you can actually get in really close really small and make it more precise if it doesn't work so that would be kind of my I do spot healing first than healing if it doesn't work that I might try the patch tool of the clone stamp another thing that's really cool the patch tool how the patch to works is you click you can see over here okay the patch so it looks like a patch you click and select wherever a blemish or problem is where the problem areas and what's great is you can click and drag and wherever you drag it toe will replace it with those pixels but what's really nice is you can actually use a special tool to make selections for long lines so if you guys ever tried the polygon a lasso tool so people say political ok I think it's probably donald I don't really know but anyway um probably gotta lasso tool so what I can do is when when you use this last o'toole wherever you click the next time you click it draws a straight line so would let me click a street line all the way down the seam I want to get to the end it'll close the selection well now all I have to do is click on my patch tool it maintains that selection and it will blend it for me all in one move so that's another one that I really like any time I have long straight lines I'll use the polygon a lasso tool right so looking around here of course I'd have to clean it up a little bit more but I really think that's all I really need to show you for this demonstration are there any questions I mean that's pretty much it it's pretty simple pretty basic cool so in other words I guess the tip that I would give to you is correct white balance is a lie you know you don't have to views a color checker you don't have to use anything like that if you're using white balance for creative effect and most the time if I'm not photographing a piece of clothing where it has to be the right color I mess with the white balance anyway I warm it up by cool it down at different tones so just keep that in mind you don't have to make things look like reality all right sure. Uh start by brenda j saying how is the healing brush different from clone different from patch sure ok something so that one more time okay, so the differences would be the museum in again okay, so the very first one the spot healing brush was good on the line the spot healing brush is wherever you click your sis saying the photoshopped this doesn't belong take a look at the pixels around guess what should go here and replaces it this is a very simple if you're trying to do a super quick retouch that would be a go to tool because you just click on the blemish I used to find it very therapeutic when I used to retouch because you just get rid of people's making people look better with one click so it would be the easy way to do it the next one down there would be the healing brush and you have to select and it's not the same as clone because what you're doing is you're selecting a sample saying this these air good pixels replaced this bad area but it's not a cut and paste it's still doing an algorithm where it's guessing but you're giving it a better guess basically you're saying this is what I like this doesn't belong look at the pixels around and blended in smoothly it's the blending and smoothly part that doesn't exist with the clone stamp clone stamp is more or less cut and paste you select an area of pixels that you like and then you paste it, which is you're cloning and your pass it is basically how see through or transparent is that's? Why most of the time, cloning isn't a good idea for skin because each time that you sample and clone on top of something every single time you clone, you're actually getting rid of texture like it starts to blur skin. So if you ever see like underneath the eyes where it's done just way too much and it looks way too smooth, they use the clone stamp. I'm going to talk later in my retouching segment about what you should do for under the eyes yes, ok, great, so content aware ah there's my constant aware of here s o concert where one thing you can do for content where is you can select something and you can right click and select content aware phil so what you're saying is basically ok photoshopped look around, take a guess what content where is doing? Is it's looking for patterns it's looking for repetition? It would likely do find for something like this. I find that it does really poorly on edges and he's having close to an edge like near her body or something like that it's considering ok, I'm looking for a petition will I see maybe repetition of this chain, so I'm going toe make it up and put it there, so when you can use either the I probably used the healing brush because it gives you a little more control or the clone stamp. If the healing brush doesn't work, all of these tend to struggle in their edges because you're trying to get it photo shopped to help you out and it's trying to make educated guesses and it's not always so educated. So in those cases when it's not working that's when the clone stamp that's kind kind of move down the line and the clone stamp is going to be the most precise but it's also usually the most time consuming to get it just right. Question for you sg photo finish wants to know when using the patch tool why does it sometimes have issues with the pixels around the lines of this election? Isn't a lo rez issue the noise or the tool itself? It's a definitely just a tool itself, the tool itself, it's trying to blend things in. And if it's just not a natural blend it, it gives you awkward edges. It's funny because I can't tell you like exactly when it works, I just try the whole like I'm I always I start whatever is easiest then move my way down the line and if it's not working I end up with the clone stamp and by the way, for those of you wanted to know if you want to get that continent where that we're talking about I selected the lasso tool if I hit delete it says phil and then it says use content where and this was introduced in what like cs for something it's been around for a while and it definitely has gotten better and so if he had okay it's supposed to guess and replace it for you and it did ok, but I still see that little line there so I'd probably want a little bit more control all right, awesome let's go on to another fund photo shoot all right, so we're still on budget all right next one all right, so I had this dream photo shoot that I wanted to do and I wanted a bride surrounded in a sea of beautiful beautiful flowers and I got as many flowers as I could afford and it wasn't enough for my c andi I'm sure some of you have run into this before um so for a sake of budget I knew that if I photographed them in a certain way I could just duplicate them and mirror them and put them around so here is some of the considerations okay first of all ideally you have a non directional light source because what happens if you have a light coming strong from one direction or the other and let's say the light was coming and really strong from the right if I want to duplicate them and move them over to the left it we'll have that same curve I mean like I could make it work but it would be a lot more hassle so it's for example if you look at brooks work I was mentioning her earlier she doesn't shoot in the sun she doesn't shoot using strokes she shoots after sunset or in the shade because there's no direction of lights to no matter what she shooting you should have to fake the light she's copies and pace it so it's really easy to d'oh um all right my next tip the I hope that you all love me for this one ok the next tip is called coping path asia if you see me teach my longer photo shop class I meant in this so cutting these flowers out is definitely possible the reason it's possible and what I would probably use on the left hand side is I would probably just use the quick selection brush and how the quick selection brush works is it's looking for areas of contrast is looking for edges so I could definitely come up to one of these flowers in the top left drag my quick selection brush and it would know what I'm trying to select because there's such a difference between that and the background but it's a lot of work um so my favorite thing is clipping paths asia I send out a file to them this is like this is regularly I send it out at midnight um I uploaded through we transfer when I wake up in the morning I have every single one of those flowers cut out on a path for four dollars so if you would like to not have to if you think you know the three hours they would take you to cut something out is worth more than four dollars that would be my suggestion on dh so for me I do like you see on my creative retouching here I do all my own creative retouching but I've started to outsource more and more things because I'm realizing that my time is more valuable than that I want to spend my time doing the creative stuff that only I can do because part of my vision but I don't need to spend time cutting these out and I don't need to spend time on pimples. One other thing that you might consider for cutting things out is a really good plug in by on one ok it's called perfect mask and fundamentally what person perfect mask allows you to do is it lets you set colors so you could say I want you to add to the selection any of these whites and pinks and you can click on them, you select him all you say, but I don't want any of this gray and so it builds a mask based on the colors and the tones that you said you want to keep her you don't want to keep, so take a look at that and on when cells all of their all of their items as a bundle so it's a pretty good deal doesn't photo shop also have a color select option? It does eso color and I'm going to I'll just open it up to sho, okay, so color has photoshopped has something called coloring, and I definitely have used this before. I grab this awesome ok, so if you go to select color range, this tool is really, really good. If you have one bold color in your photograph, let's say that there is a bright red car you want to select that entire car and change the color of it or darken it down. It works great because what you'll do is you can go ahead and you use your eyedropper brush to select the color or the tone that you're interested in when you hold the shift key down as you click around every different tone you click, it adds to that selection the problem is it's seeing like maybe I wanted just to select the dresses the dress it's seeing the highlights on the flowers and I don't have a way to teo negate that and say I don't want the flowers where is in the plug and it makes it a little bit easier it's still definitely something you could do especially when you have a lot of colors the fuzziness slider here is basically saying ok, so you selected white how far into like kind of white ish grazed you want us to go or how far into grey or black so the further that I dragged fuzziness it reaches into other tones whereas if I drag it all the way to the left it will only get exactly what I clicked on it would take a lot more clicks this way, but it could be more precise and you can also go ahead and view your selection on your photo as a masks you can kind of see what your selection is on the larger photo, so this is definitely something you could do especially if you don't want to spend money on another plug in or something like that it's definitely a good way to go or you see even open up other photo here let's select yeah absolutely home says you wanted to use that color range could you kind of cheat it and like make a random selection around her dress and then put it into that coloring. So it's just thinking about the yeah, it did not do the flowers and then go back toso you could actually do multiple selection, so I think that it's easier let's just say, ok, guys, we don't want tio don't want to spend money, we don't want to outsource, we don't want tio I don't want to buy a plug in so let's do it this way. Five human let's take a look with the quick, quick selection to would be so this is the quick selection tool right here, it's under the lasso tool and what you do is you dragging to see how that worked, like pretty well right away, and I could just click around and I can actually click and drag and any of the pixels I click over it'll make a selection off, so obviously, I mean, this would take a while, so I'm just going to do if you get the idea and I'm clicking and dragging and you have a tool here for refined edge. So for example, let's say that the edge it is on a background that's kind of close in tone. You have all these different abilities to be smooth out the edge, if it's rough. Or to reach into other tones you can feather, which softens the edge a little bit to see how if the edge was really, really harsh you know how sometimes to do that selection it's jagged? Well, if you go here and click on refine and it lets you soften that out a little bit, so it's not as noticeable, so maybe I'll do something like that not to go back and click a few more family. All right, so let me just say I got one more, okay? So now what I'm going to do is I'm going to hit the shortcut command jay and command j is one of the few shortcuts that I say everyone has to know and photo shop because there's like a million of them so it's cotton pace into a new layer that's, that's all it is. So now if I turn off these bottom layers, I have the flowers on their own and that's popular, so what I'm going to dio isn't gonna click over to my move tool when a zoom out just a little bit and I cannot drag these around, change the size, rotate them and fit them wherever they need to be so something maybe like that you can always zoom in erase and blend things ok know what I did for the photo overall is that background is like so ugly it was literally a concrete so I was at a venue where we're shooting is a wedding venue and I'm shooting over a balcony and I have relying on a cement floor and so what I would do is it would go ahead and it would make a similar selection using those tones or I would do your color range and I would just dark and everything down so I'm going to go down here to my right hand corner and go to my half moon cookie uh adjustment layers I don't know I don't know who taught me that that I love it because that's like half moon cookies they're good um so I'm gonna go to curves and you could do levels as well and right now I'm actually just going too dark and down the entire photograph okay? And I was going to darken it down a little bit and so what I can do then is I'm going to use mass and we'll talk about masks in death later I mean I use mass nonstop so that would be my next tip if you don't use layer masks and adjustment layers with their masks your absolutely slowing yourself down and really really restricting what you could do a photo shop it is like the number one thing I say you need to know it's it's awesome so if you look here when I made curves anything that's white that curves effect darkening everything down is applied to anywhere where it's white okay, now if you want a race let's save normally you duplicated it, you darkened and he went around the race and then you screwed up and then you try to go back twenty steps and you can because that's where it stops and it's a pain masks are adjustment layers and their masks or nondestructive so it's basically in my mind um basically like a gel on top of those layers so there's a bunch of different ones. For example, if I did something that was black and white, I could put it on a top player in space like a black and white gel saying everything below this is black and wife okay, well for curves, what I can do here is if I grab my black brush anywhere that I paint it, get rid of that curves effect it is basically hiding the curves or racing so I'm gonna grab a large brush I'm going to make it soft and I'm going toe get rid of that effect we'll move it up so it's on everything okay? And so you can go around and darken it light and increased the contrast and that's more or less what I did lots and lots of copy and paste so I just duplicated the background, duplicated the flowers I'm on the move tool with command t command t is what gives me that transform control so I can then click and rotate and duplicate the flowers pretty simple and saves a lot of money so any questions wasteland those selections just you know there are definitely more complicated ways to make selections there's a way to go into channels where you can dodge and burn and basically anything that's light you make a lighter and I think that's dark you make darker and then you make a selection onto that if it's simple and you can just do ah quick selection just two quick selection you know I learned long ago that if you try to achieve perfection your life wastes away very quickly so as long as it's passable and no one's going to call you out on it you're totally fine so just don't show it to you really like really nerd friends they're going to call you out on something like them we have a quick question war and want to know what's the best way to select a certain color if the colors around it are very similar so that is not easy at all so ok you want I'll give you the hard answer the hard answer is using thiopental the pen tool is right here okay when you zoom in a pen tool allows you to draw a selection I'm making a path so what you do is you click and you define the arc of that path and so you know for example you can outline whatever you want um it takes some getting used to but it's also very time consuming so I don't want to say that a that plug in is the easiest but I found that the on one perfect mess because it'll let me say even close and colors that this version of the pink keep this version of the pink get rid of and then remember our fuzziness reached into other tones I get I give it no fuzziness so it just says this pink keep this pink get rid off you know make this election based on that so this would be the hard way to do it but it's the way that probably most professionals make the outlines yeah just it layers you said it wasn't destructive is that kind of the similar to like a smart object isn't so how yes so how it works is I'm not actually making any changes whatsoever to the pixels, eh? So what it's basically doing is now in light room you khun dio virtual copies where you think you're making a version you're doing changes was not really changing anything it's a similar idea so none of this is changing any of pixels it's just like a gel and then you can pull the gel away if you don't want it smart objects it's the same idea of china to be trying to be non destructive but it's not the same function like is not really doing the same thing, but yeah, smart objects and just malaysian. Their masts are definitely something you want to use. So you did a white mask on there. What would be the decision to do a black mask and do the reverse painting paid her? You know what your decision process to do? Block point. Okay, so the question was one of the things that you khun dio is if you want, tio, when you create your curves, you can, for example, fill in with a black mask, a grey mask. You. So what that means is you can make it so you don't see that curves change and then you added in or you can go ahead and make the entire effect and then erase it away. Says the questions like okay, how do I decide which way I want to go to? I want to raise the affect her at it. I know that I want the whole photo darkened down, so it just like less painting because I was looking at it originally. And it's just it's too washed out. I want more drama, um, if I were going tio, go ahead and paint the whole background. It's probably be more time consuming, so I don't I don't wantto go over the flowers too much so I could just see what I can fudge and fake a little bit better if I go the other way. All right. So those were my two big budget once, basically first set prop design. Anything that's, an expensive that's, expensive like that. Ok, so it's good number two convenience when something is just easier it's just easier to do in photo shop, then in then, actually of a hand. So thiss is a video for a really cool creative effect where it looks like I painted her black but painting someone black is a huge hassle. So I actually is able to do it in front of you. Sneak that I've done several times before, and it took me a long time to figure it out. What we had to do is actually loop of the model's skin. I had to pick a really dark skinned model, and what that does is allows me to place my lights so I could get really cool highlights on the skin. And we wanted somebody who had really strong, elegant lines, and the model that we use was mari from major model management, she was fantastic, great personality and a beautiful model. The idea of the shoe is more elastic, she'll appear in silhouette, so what will be is her skin will be completely black with some really beautiful highlights and then maybe the clothes or the jewelry that she has on will pop out of the frame. We had a really great time I had my entire team that lovett had lisa smith craig from four season style management doing all the styling and gristle rosario doing the hair and makeup so we had a wonderful time come on six lights I had two lights in the front and they were soft boxes one was high and one was low and what those were used for are basically to capture those highlights on her skin. Now I had two lights in the background so would become completely white blown out and then also to life on the side that we're waiting on the side of her body and also the phil karzai had any other side. So the idea is lots of reflections but also to make it look like a silhouette so it was kind of complicated. One of the more complicated shoots have done the past thankfully have experimented with it before and then the last piece of that equation is actually post doing in photo shopped to make the skin that much darker and then also increasing the contrast the equipment that I use in the shoot was a lot of lighting but really just one lands I use my cannon five d mark two and I use my sigma twenty four to seventy millimeter two point eight lens now for the equipment I used bron color I had three cents a pack six heads to strip lights to one hundred soft boxes and then just two lights on the background okay, so everyone who's like holy crap that was a lot I'll show you what it really was okay um okay so what you need if you wanted to do this effect and I love this I've used it a ton of times causes great for cool jewelry it looks awesome for fine art nudes it's really graphic and it fits my style I was originally inspired by a french photographer and I was looking at his photos and it looks like the girls were painted in black latex and I tried that and it did not work at all so it was really funny because I put out an ad on model mayhem to test without and literally this is what the ad said um fifty dollars two hours you're going to stand there nude and I'm going to cover you with different loops on and you would be surprised how many people responded to that post yeah and so I described the loops because someone says what do you greasing the way okay, so what I'll tell you what I tried okay? I did try k why I'm just telling you all because I didn't I was experimenting um baby oil and gasoline what I found was that the combination of the baby oil and gasoline was what I liked best and so basically I'm just covering her and the models love it cause he said their skin feels really nice and soft afterwards so they don't actually like minded off um so the whole idea is like ok wanted I knew it wasn't painting her black and so for the girl that I was experimenting with, the one that I found originally model may have I loved her up and I was hooked up into a tether and I was in photo shop or in light room and I had it so that it was doing this photo shop effect on her and I'll tell you what it is in a second s so you don't have to do it as complicated as this, so the demo shot I'm going to show you has no lube involved and one light so it can be achieved easier but I was going for a specific look, so you do need a white background because you wanted to be silhouetted if she's I mean you probably could do something cool on black but it's not the same idea um I use the two v flats on either side, which is basically just big pieces of foam court because I was trying to catch a cz much light as possible reflecting everywhere the whole idea is how many reflections can I create? So I had two lights in the background to make the background white two lights in the v flats to give her reflections here and two lights in the front to give me as many reflections in the front as possible you could definitely get away with one big light in the front and two lights in the back then you could get away with that for sure, but the more highlights, the better so here's an example of what it looks like okay, so you're getting the idea too on the background to delight the signs to delight in the front and it just experimenting with different techniques and here's some more of these images I've shot this tons of times because it looks so cool they're not painted it all you saw her let me show you um an example of a shot that's actually not even using any of those you could make it even simpler. So I did this shoot last week with this girl okay she's actually if anyone's america america's next top model fan as marie livingston I don't know you recognize her alright so notice she doesn't have any highlights on her skin she is not super super super dark and I was using one light I was using a silver reflector dish on her face but I can still kind of manipulate this to get that look all right? So the first thing I need is to turn into black and white if I don't do this in black and white it doesn't work it's it has to be done in black and white so I want to convert to grayscale all right so when you've done the convert a great skill and this is right now I'm in adobe camera raw needa little squiggles okay um if you've seen this slider you've also seen it in photo shop when you convert to black and white see how the reds oranges, yellows all the way it's black on the left and then it looks white on the right the little sliders it's literally telling you what's happening when you dragged the sliders converting to black and white so for example skin tones caucasian african american everybody skin tones are made up of red, yellow and orange so if I want someone skin to be really light and really creamy and porcelain I dragged the reds, yellows and oranges to the right and I can give so I mean anybody I could give smooth porcelain skin well they're not smooth texture wise but a consistency of the tones but conversely let's say I want her to be solid black I can drag these the opposite direction and so I could make somebody solid solid black well ok, I need some highlights I need something to give it a little bit of contrast so when you go back over and selected the regular adjustments you know, contrast and exposure and whatnot and I'm going to drag contrast and I want to drag highlights and I won't increase my exposure a little bit and I'm going to drag my white so basically what I'm doing is I'm bringing the highlights up in the shadows down so I can do something very similar to that effect to see how it's picking up the highlights and she's kind of going solid black and I have one light and no lube so that's I mean that's how it works. So knowing that when you convert to black and white you can change how each colors represented is a tool that I use non stop that's how I get a lot of models to have that perfect really smooth white skin or incredibly solid black skin I'm a person of extreme so that's what I usually do I usually do one extreme or the other in the middle is boring to may okay, so I'm gonna keep going all right, so next one s o this is one of the dresses from my new company s o I designed dresses specifically for photographers this actually has six yards of trains six of them six six yard ones and so I brought out on location this is what it started like um and this is under the convenience section because I had six people flapping those trains I could not get them all to look at it like I want it all at the same time, you know, it's it's extremely extremely difficult to do that. So what I did is I had my camera on a tripod and had each person flutes in each train so that I would get each one perfect, it doesn't matter how many shots it takes me, I just need to capture each train in a good position. So for example, over here, the only thing that I liked was her position of her hands. I don't even use any of the trains over there, but what I liked was a bunch of other photos, so this is where it ends up and I'll show you how to do it. Um, what you need is a tripod, so you're gonna wanna have your camera locked down so that everything stays in the same position because we're basically just going to be cutting, pasting in, erasing and so if your camera moves at all it's going to make it much more difficult so you want that tripod and you definitely want your focus and exposure to say the same so I would say set your camera to manual exposure set your camera to manual focus so everything is consistent and then just click away and you can do this with any dress you have if you have a dress with just a little little train you can flip it on one side, move it over to the other flip it on the other you can have it go up beyond the models head and then composite them together so when I think of composites I think of people like alum of creative live dole grimes no definitely watch his class if you like you know those type of composite see composites athletes and things like that when I think compositing I think of ok how can I make things convenient or how can I make something surreal happen? All right, so this is what ended up like so I'm gonna grab those pieces and just show you real quick hollywood composite together the dress right? So I want to do is and I went ahead and in light room I picked out dresses where I liked different flu fs okay and notice everything was supposed to say the same and I we moved to flower because it was getting knocked over so it's not totally the same but it's close ish all right? So I'm gonna go ahead and open these up in photo shop really cool tool in light room is if you select all the ones that you want when you go to photo at it in you can open as layers so it will automatically open with them staffed and it saves you the effort of having to you know, drag and drop in click, which is kind of a pain but all right, so let's give that a try so I am just going to go ahead and stack these photos so all I'm doing is I'm grabbing one photo using the move tool and dragging and dropping and I'm going to close it when I'm done with it drag and drop okay, well, that should be all of them. All right, so if you look here I have my four layers and I have the bottom where is the the hand pose that I want like that's the foundation you know, she is the foundation of a soul keep it there so what? Ideo they go ahead and I figure out what flu fi like for each photo all right, so too soon o on the left hand side here, when you click the I buttons it turns the later on or off so I'm going to turn them all off and then just turn them on as needed. So for this first layer, I know that I like this flu phe okay it's a foot right okay, so I know that I like that flew for but I don't want to have to go ahead in a race everything but that flew phe this kind of a pain so you could do two things one thing that you could do is you could add a mask and we talked about that briefly earlier we're going to get into even more in depth later but if I add just a mass down here it's a rectangle with a circle in it by default it and a white mask which means everything in that photo you can see it's applied anywhere that I paint black it what will a race ok well then I'd have to raise the whole thing so a short cut is if you hold alter option and then click adler mask he adds a black mask so I can then go ahead and so black means everything in that photo is hidden I can then go ahead grab white and just paint in that flew for I want it that's pretty easy. Okay, well if for some reason you're not comfortable with masks, it stresses you out you don't want to do it that way something else that you khun d'oh it's pretty simple is you can grab the lasso tool and just roughly select your flute and use that tool or that a shortcut I told you before command j so now I'm going to delete that base layer and because it copied and pasted the flu if into the top layer so no I have that's loof on its own layer and I can just go in and a race you can go in and erase anything that I don't want and I can use a soft brush because this fabric is moving I don't it doesn't actually have a hard edge you could also use your quick selection tool to select the entire piece of fabric and then invert the selections you select the fabric select the outside and then erase that part or you could just blend it like I'm lending okay so I think you guys get the idea I can do that and I'm just going to kind of run through it quickly but I can turn on this one and we know which one I liked there like this big flu phe what is there a better name for it love it ok that the chat rooms they're loving it tio yes I am really good at making justice looks lucy is that if I wasn't a photographer I would be addressed flew fair ok all right ok I can race again so something that I wanted to make a point of his okay I can go ahead and you know blend this is the hole it doesn't have to be perfect thing so five zero in here okay clearly this doesn't work but all I have to do is I can maybe pick a later a later capacity, basically, I'm erasing but less of it, and I could just kind of blend so it's, not perfect, but if it looks close enough, no problem by someone in a hurry is this it's just a matter of tricking the eye doesn't need to be perfect. So, for example, up here, this was our first layer. It doesn't need to be perfect, but if I just like, splendid a bit, you can't tell it's quite a little bit if you can tell it's not a problem, so I would just kind of blend in a little bit more there. Okay, so I grabbed my last plouffe ok, so we ended up happening is I like these two and I've got it all set up. It looks good, but the problem I'm running into is I really want one perfect right here, but I didn't get one. I got one coming right in the middle of the frame that I don't like. It's, it's, it's not exactly where we wanted it to be, so we're going to select it and think that it's in the perfect place so when I use my lasso tool and roughly select that piece of fabric and hit command, jay and now that I have it, I'm going to use my transform controls and the warp tool, so the war of tool is something that comes into a lot of handy if you're not familiar with it. So if you click on the move tool I get the bounding box around that selection you can see it here and I can just click and move this this this one click and move this election around wherever I wanted teo I can rotate it so it's kind of giving me roughly the direction location I wanted. The problem is this piece of fabric is not reaching to the end, so it won't look natural I can make it larger click and drag and it's clicking and dragging the edge while holding the shift key maintained his proportions, but then I don't know if I think that looks natural either. So a shortcut that you want to know is when you're in the transform control's ok, when the bounding boxes are highlighted, that would be command t activates that if you right click you can grab the warp tool and the work still gives you a grid and you khun drag elements of this photograph anywhere you want it and so along this grid it'll kind of lock the elements at the top and allow you to stretch the elements at the bottom and so I can kind of fit it to be exactly how I wanted to be, you could change the shape a little bit, maybe something like that, and then I would just go back to my blending and I could do again. I would probably use a mask, but we're gonna talk about that later, so you can also just their race to blend case of the one thing that I didn't think looked extremely believable here is I think I want the fabric to be a little see through see how this is see through, but this is solid, so we could just back off the a pass ity just a tiny bit toe let the floor show through. So when I actually did this retouch, you can check it out. It's up on my block right now e think it took me about a half hour half hour to forty minutes to actually go in and do it well, but if you look, I'm able to get, you know, convenient sake, I couldn't possibly get them all in the right place at the right time and get the pose I wanted, but I can composite together the individual pieces think of this as well, let's say that you don't have this awesome dress, but you have a long piece of fabric that matches the dress. Go ahead and have her hold still proof in one part of the frame move to the other move to the other and you could actually create this dress completely out of pieces from photo shop so are there any questions on that apartment I'm going to say said from france how much can you use those free that those free transform before the pixels or damon really good question okay so whenever you stretch something like if you've ever taken a photo and dragged the edges to make it larger and photoshopped it starts to pick feli so I would say it depends on what you're doing when you're moving something like a piece of fabric it looks like texture and the fabric and plus that photo was already blurry idea the fabric from movement was already blurry if you're trying the same thing of a person's face you would notice it much more quickly so I have no problem with something like fabric like doubling the size and it not being an issue but it's something as soon as is a person's face or an important close development you will notice so it's kind of a judgment call what I would do is zoom in at one hundred percent and to see what you feel about that picks elation another plug in if you were doing this and you really needed that piece of fabric and you needed to be blown up three hundred times it size and it was pixelated another plug in is called on one perfect resize and it used to be called genuine fractals had it way back when and now they bunched it altogether but what that does is it increases the size of whatever photo or whatever pixels you have um really however large you wanted I've blown up a picture that was sized for a sixteen by twenty two six foot by eight foot no problem and not seen and not had any problem with hicks elation so if you do something like that or maybe you're going back and you're looking at old photographs that you think were you love but it was with an old camera so they're not big enough you'd use perfect resized to inter plate them or to make them larger and the same thing if there's an element in a photograph you know I love the bird back there but I want it large and in the foreground you could use perfect resize to enlarge that and the composite into your frame all right, right next part is creative lighting so using photo shopped for creative lighting this is what helps me make money because I can correctly show off whatever supposed to be highlighted in that photograph maybe it's going to be the bag maybe is going to be the ring I see this a ton and watch ads like you know that really nice tag ad with leader dicaprio looking all of handsome there that that watch was photograph separately and put on so let's take a look s o I had a concept for this one shoot and the idea of the shoot is all the clothing that she wore was glittery it was all shiny it was metallics it was um it was glitter I mean was everything and what I wanted was for her to be in silhouette with the clothing to sparkle and was trying to figure out how to do that with lighting um because you can get like, get a grid to like specific parts of her body but then two face is still going to be led and really it's it's basically impossible to do that in camera so that I was trying to figure out how do I like this to be able to achieve that effect? And the answer is as crappy as possible because I personally think that is that's pretty horrendous lighting right there's no contrast there's no direction to it but the reason it's good is if it was to contrast e I wouldn't be able for example, if they're highlights on her legs I wouldn't be able to easily make them solid black in photo shop and if it's really flat I can do what I used to do it before there was hdr did anyone ever do double processing of photos like what would say for example have a picture of a lake and a sky a sunset for the skies to blown out and the lake is too dark I would shoot right in between and I would open up that raw file and the first time that opened up that raw file id process it for the sky the second time might open up that raw file id process it for the lake in light room you can open as layers and photoshopping the basically a race and just combine the two together so that's what I did here I would open up the file twice once that it was exposed so she'd be a silhouette and the other times it was exposed correctly for the dress and then it's just a racing a little bit of patients so here's what you would need to do this shoot or something like this I used white seamless and it is white plexi glass on the floor was just so that I didn't have to photo shop about the floor if it were to dark so wait plexiglass you can get at you know home improvement stores and things like that pretty inexpensive makes nice reflections if you want them all right so I needed my crappy light okay well not that this is bad but I used a seven foot shoot through umbrella it's broad it doesn't have a lot of contrast it was white it's just even pretty flat light source they use the westcott seven foot shoot through which is really nice because that umbrella is only ninety nine dollars so it's like a you know, a big light source for pretty inexpensive I use three strobes to in the background to make it white one on the foreground for the subject says basically what it looked like okay, nothing too impressive, but the magic happens in the post processing, so let me grab that file and open it up so it opened up and photo shop and so I have to pick what I want to do first. All right? So I think I am going to first alternate black and white and I think I'm going to get the dress right first, so I don't need to pay attention to what she looks like whatsoever just paying attention to the dress and I'm going to increase contrast in the dress I want to increase the exposure, I'm gonna drag the black so this whole time all I'm trying to do is just make the dress pop like that there's no formula, I'm just trying to make it look shiny let me increase clarity so I think the dress looks good that looks what I look like, what I'd want someone hit, ok, then open it up good and now I'm gonna open up that same file well more time in this time try to make her look like a silhouette all right? So I got to go back to black and white and we already talked about in that previous example that skin tones are made of red, yellow and orange so if I know I want her skin to go black let's see how much I can get done just in my black and white conversion and because she's pretty pale eso it only gets me so far it's going to go back to my original adjustments and let's see if I could drag my black points cat looks pretty good how about increasing the contrast that looks pretty good it's dark and down the image a little bit looking even better and then I can just wait enough the background a little bit so that gives me my silhouette. I had open image and I'm going to drag and drop using the move tool if you were dragging and dropping two combined images hold the shift key and it will line them up so they line up evenly on top of one another. Okay, so now I'm going to zoom in and I'm looking at this and I see like a little detail that aiken aiken dark and down later but basically I just need to a race or mask so I've already talked about adding masks I am going to hit the mask but down here it's a rectangle with the circle in it I click that and anywhere that I paint black is basically a racing so I could not I could also just make a selection of it too. So what? You could also d'oh it's there. All right, I want to select this whole dress, but I grabbed my quick selection tool. I click around the photograph really easy to select this dress and of course I could take more time, but what can I get to the point here? All right, so it's like the whole dress go back to that top layer and I can paint black or use a paint uh, paintbrush, paint bucket and of course that have to do a little bit of tweaking, but more or less, you know that's the effect that I wanted. So what? I think this is cool for for examples maybe you photograph high school senior portrait and you have one of the you have a guy with a basketball and you have him in the basketball says his team on it he's in silhouette it's a really nice shape, but the basketball is lit with the logo on or maybe it's going to be a necklace that you go ahead and you expose it once so that it pops it has a lot of contrasts and a lot of shine so this is doing it from one image what they really do in the high end editorials is they actually shoot multiple images and combine it so that's what I'm going to do in the next sample and this was an editor or this was the advertisement that I shot for a jewelry designer, so look at that I booked this model through her agent and her agent didn't tell her that her face wouldn't be visible, so senator, the pictures that give their any of my face so I like retouched and tried to, like, salvage one of them close at the mall and I like that she's really sweet, really cute girl okay, so under the next one creative lighting using photo shop all right, so this is an advertising campaign I've actually just photo, uh, photographed this woman's runway show for fashion weeks, a fashion in court just a couple weeks ago and each so how it works in new york each season designer comes out with a new collection and they need it photographed so they can use on their website and it's called a look book and they'll use it in advertising and so she needed me to shoot. And so she said, I want something really dark and dramatic but that you can clearly see all the jewelry and she goes, you know, like those two beers ads half those two beers that are drawings have you seen you know I'm talking about they're not like half the de beers ads are actually sketches and then they have like a nearing put on so unlike how do I do this and so this is one of the challenges that I run into as a fashion photographer is when people have high demands and no budget and so that's when photoshopped comes into place perfectly because you can find creative solutions that don't cost a lot of money and that's what I said for the setting for the flowers so for this one what I did is I shot two images and really simply combined them in post all right so let's take a look at the lighting set ups for these all right so for that very first image I is something called spot projection if any of you shoot a lot in the studio and you're getting a little bored of what you have totally check these out a opens up an entire new world of possibilities basically how it works is typically kind of turned your light into for nell like it focuses it um and then it's like a for nell with a snoop and then you can stick shapes in it ok so for um bron color which is a top one they call a spot projector for pro photo they call it multi spot and for boeing's it is called spot it's all kind of the same thing, so what you do is you can focus the beam of light, and then so you see where it has like the little slip in the back, you can go ahead and get different gobo is different shapes and put them into the light, and that shape is and projected on the subject. So one of my favorite photographers name is solve a sons beau need to this beautiful siri's where it's nudes and have all these different patterns projected on them, but it didn't look like it was from a projector there. So chris been so high contrast, you could tell it wasn't the same thing, so try to figure out how it was done, and this is how it was done. You go ahead and you can go online, whether it's at obama being age barbizon lighting also has it, and you can buy whatever shapes you want tick tack toes, you can buy flowers, you can buy whatever shapes, and so I've used it for a couple advertising campaigns, and this is the look that it gives you. So if you ever wondered how they get that slice of light that's, how they get the slice of light so actually got in that particular example, I didn't even use a gobo I actually used to give you slices these little pieces of plastic and you can put in there to make a triangle or a diamond, so I'm able to highlight her face and in the one on the right, I'm using the venetian blind gobo to project on her face, so there was I don't know if it was guests or perfume ad with christina aguilera that they did kind of ah ah film new are look, and they had venetian blinds projected on her. It wasn't shot through the nation blinds it was shot using one of these lights, and darryl said it there's a sun added beyonce with it as well. Um, and I actually I know that bones makes and I think also, um, I think there's like three or four other of the less expensive companies that have a cz well, if you're looking to do that, okay, so here are my tips if you wanted to do this, he wanted to shoot and combined two images together, so you do need a tripod for both images. Image one an image to you can't move the tripod you need a pico spot projector for the first image and that's what you saw and to room lights, so if you look, you can see the spot as on her face, and I made it a circle and then there's two rim lights from the back angles and that's what gives you the highlights to pop round from the back on so she doesn't just blend in for the two back lights in my studio I other use barn doors because barn doors allow and there you see him in movie lighting but I use it in my studio because I can close down those barn doors to a sliver and just get the sharpest most controlled highlight if you have a lot of money to spare both brown color and pro photo make these things called strip lights not talking about the strip boxes they're actually the strobes our lights are strips of the small one this one's five thousand and this this one's eight thousand and you need to do so you might have that money so that they did works really great so that might be another solution but I usually just use the barn doors so on that first when you see pekoe spot on her face and then the two room lights from behind ok the next image the two run lights from behind stay the same but I'm trying to figure out how to light this jewelry anybody ever took a product class and you're trying to light metal I don't know if anyone has ever taken that class with one of the things that I learned is that you need a large broad light source so actually for a lot of products that air medal I think ours as well they'll use huge scrims like really big pieces of diffusion material and then light that diffusion so it gives just nice even highlights the entire way I didn't use a scrim instead I used a large soft box so used and it didn't need to be that large because it's just lighting the small piece on her body so is a three by four foot soft box now if you're shooting with ah company that allows you to set lights different channels this would be easiest so here's what I can dio I got my camera my tripod on I've got the pico spot with the two rooms that to channel a and then the soft box with the two rims said to channel b so all I have to do is she gets an opposed click click to switch over the channel and so I get those too and I will say ok next pot's click click and next to and they might not be perfect but they're definitely close enough to photo shop the subjects should try to hold still as much as possible but a little movement won't be a problem and so here is what it looked like pico spot from the front left she's looking up to it really really focused on her face I could actually get a peek a spot and I've done this before where just put the highly on the I just a circle that's how much control you have it's really really cool and then to background lights and then for the second image the soft box so would it actually looked like though is this there were stacked on each other and then I would just switch the channel that it was on ok well let's take a look at the photo shop part of it now I shot much much, much more complicated ones of these where she had like the full body chains with like all the all the little links there are probably a thousand links and to cut that out would be insane so I sent it tio clipping past asia and they charge me twelve dollars to cut out a thousand length so and they did it I don't know how they did they did that when they're like I'm so sorry it's going to take a little longer than usual can we get it back to in twenty four hours it's like definitely awesome so good ok let me grab this all right? So the two images that I have um another thing okay, so you're looking at this and you see my light stands it's going to be solid black anyway I'm just gonna paint it black but it doesn't matter I needed that light to be so close to her in order to get that christmas the further back I go the more it spreads out and less chris best circle would be it doesn't matter that it's in the frame because I'm just gonna paint it solid black anyway so it's no big deal all right so what I'm going to do in this image is I'm gonna go ahead and I am going to grab my quick selection tool and it is super super simple off course if you have a more complicated one we talked about all of the different options you have before well, you know, for something like this the high end magazines they probably don't use quick selection they probably do use a pencil we'll go around and just get it exactly precise so I was kind of click and drag a little bit more and uh it with the quick selection tool if you hold on to see if you go ahead and hold the all turkey you see how actually erased it let's say that I didn't want that length selected if you hold the all key and you drag your quick selection it will remove from this election sort of add to it so let's say that you overdo it then you're like oh crap I don't want to do this whole selection again just hold your altar option key and I'll take care of it for you ask what at this beckon and of course I'd probably go more carefully on the real thing but this will definitely be pretty close right off the bat all right, so once I've got my selection all set when you use thie shortcut that I said is the best ever command j copies and pace into a new layer, and then I use my move tool and I'm going to hold onto the shift key so that it lines it up in the other photo. Now it probably won't be perfect, but it will be close, all right? Looks good. Someone zoom in and try to line these up. And the only thing I see is I would probably need to clean up the edges a little bit and then just a race next to her face. And so I will just give myself medium hardness and you could mask or a race at one hundred percent something like that. And then my solution for the background is super complicated. I'd grab a black brush and pain because I want it black so it would look about something like that. So that's how you see any time you see those hearing advertisements, the ring advertisements that watch advertisement, one of my favorite ones if you wantto anyone out there wants to look it up. If you look for calvin klein watch ad they have a whole serious were shot with pico spot projection had a couple together and they would project a strip of light down the couple just on the watch and it's beautiful this is how they did it their shooting multiple images and combining it okay questions a fireman mike if you do have a question let's go it's the chapmans funny half the time when there's no questions I get concerned the other half is like all explained it and it's pretty simple like you don't know if it's like a good thing or bad thing but we're gonna go with good thing you said use it people circular projection on her face there's a shadow that cuts across her mouth what does that come from? Ok so that is from the back rim light the way that she's turned the background lights just hitting her face in a way that it creates a little bit of a shadow if she was facing straight on to me you would just see the jaw and the highlight here and then nothing around the mouth but since she's turned it picks up a little bit of that highlight um and it's and I've done this before where it's been like just the strip horizontally just here it looks really cool so may number four is went making the impossible possible for me I love putting a person a frame multiple times but not just like hey let's you know like herself in front like I tried to tell a story so for me it's about editorial storytelling again to bring up brooke brooke will do that she does this to make the impossible possible making people float for example, whereas jewel grimes might do it for a composite to put somebody in a place that wouldn't be possible. So this is one of my favorite editorials that I ever shot um and so what I would do is I would have the camera on a tripod and I would shoot the model in one outfit same focus, same exposure have her change and then to her in the same scene in another outfit and then it's just erasing but I mean, this whole editorial it was it was beautiful was able to tell a really interesting story and so here's some more images from it can you see the reflection in the mirror one of those she's wearing a different outfit speak three p uh you know here she's she's looking in the mirror and herself or in the window at herself she's in the scene more than one time so it's a storytelling tool for me the reason this has been so useful and I've used it to make money so I had a client come to me and she said I would like to do a photo shoot and I would like you to express my range I'm a professional athlete but I'm also certificate sophisticated woman I could be really aggressive and I can be really athletic but I can also be really elegant and sophisticated can you do a photo shoot that says that that was like I could do it in one image um so that's her twice and so we did a whole shoot where we would what I did is I photographed her three times dressed as a guy or with minimal makeup with more masculine clothing I was on a tripod and it left the light the same I photograph for three times and then I had her switch outfits put on more makeup and photograph for three times as a woman and combine them together so you see down here she has her hands that's on was actually on her assistant on just posing on the assistant to get the right the right angles for her hands but it's this is one light camera at the same angle camera takes aim exposure and then it's just blending the two together just to racing so you can kind of see that here so what I used is for this effect they use the dark gray seamless and I used one stroke and see how dramatic and chris but this light is I mean those shadows under her nose are crisp and it is dramatic and it is focused like so I used another modifier that I absolutely love which is called a tele zoom reflector or a long throw so you know the lights that usually on your background the little silver reflector dishes I can imagine that but really deep on and so the example that I always use when talking about light is thinking about light as a bob bucket of water lets you have a pan of water and I throw it at you guys in the audience it spreads out everywhere right and it barely reaches you but let's say I take a really deep bucket he gets soaked and it's focused right on him and says the exact same way when I have a small dish the light goes everywhere when I have a deep dish it focuses it right on the subject a lot of contrast a lot of light so if I keep my exposure the same my camera angle the same the lens the same I can combine them together and this is what the that's the pro photo long throw and brown color calls it a p fifty it's it's the fifty is talking about the angle of throw of the light never p seventy and they have other piece um so this is what it looked like long throw there and then come back compositing it together if they literally was just a racing I didn't do anything more than just lined up in erased pretty simple right? So I've done this a bunch of times as you can tell this is one of my favorite things um the girl on the left is actually a mannequin and I copied and pasted her head on the left so this was an advertisement for signal lenses and they wanted to show the detail of the lenses they blew blew this up to eight foot tall and so when you walk by and see mannequin and I retouched to look like a mannequin and that actually the model all right, so for the last one style and design this is this is for me a photo shop is part of my style and I do all these cool creative graphic things what's really good is I'm going to give you a taste of the style but are actually going to show you how these work later so you guys will see it and hopefully everybody stays watching um so for example, the picture on the left it looks kind of kind of flat you're not not so interesting, but I'll shoot it on purpose because I knew I'm going to pump up the contrast and know that I want some noise in fact, this was shot in a room with almost no light, but you would never know that from the un image because I knew I was going to increase contrast I knew I was going to sharpen it I wanted that grungy feel if I popped a lot of light and it wasn't gonna have kind of that that textured grunge to his face that I wanted to actually rob fake money did you know that there's makeup that's mud that you could buy like he's? Not just mud you buy what makeup so as we had on his face there um so for a surreal effect I'll shoot and combined things that I make a surreal environment so see how this is kind of like stylistic this is part of the entire vision of it it's not about convenience it's not about creating about budgets about my vision is having a model duplicated twice in the scene but this would be the one most common for me is I'm achieving some kind of graphic element in post so this is what the shot looks like I have somebody holding her dress you can see the whole background this is shot with one light subedi dish in front and two silver reflectors on a seamless in the back but I did entire editorial in the theme of this editorial was was ink blot like russia tests? And so I knew that's what I was going to do a new in post that I was going toe blared on each other and duplicate. And so actually I did it a ton of times for cool things like this and so it's important for me photographically to know what I can do and photo shop because I would have never ever shot this editorial which I personally love if I didn't know how easy it was to do this. And we're going to talk about how easy it is with blend modes. You know, for example, this was kind of the lead image of the story with this picture originally looks like she has a piece of cardboard on the side of her body, painted black and white, with little feathers. And I just duplicated it a million times to give it that ink blot effect.