Lessons

Lesson Info

Compositing Fashion Shoot Part 1

I'm gonna talk through what I'm doing but again I mean I may miss a few things and you say ah explain that well I'll try to remember to explain what I'm doing but maybe a few things and hopefully have covered it before if not just remember the photo shop is this big expand you know world of that we get lost into and there's so many ways of doing photo shop any anything you there's ten ways to do one thing there's a hundred ways to do it are a thousand ways to do it but here's what I would say anytime I talk about photo shop I have to at least cover this that isthe if you talk to the best retouch ear's in the world finishers retouch is whatever you wanna call the guys at the gals that are doing the big I mean we're talking high end stuff they'll tell you that there's one thing that they're always a conscious off that is destroying their image they minimize destruction and there's a thousand ways to destroy our image so you want to learn a workflow that minimizes destruction so number on...

e you have to work in raw start with broad makes sense, right? You don't work for j pig and there are people that say I j pegs no it's not let me explain a j peg if this floor we've got wood slats but let's say those air tiles I'm on this floor look at this floor I'm standing in from the outside looking in I see this tile floor and I go wow that's beautiful let's say those are the image that represented the image a j peg is a paper thin representation of this floor there's no support on it you stand on it, you'll fall right through it can't dance on it you can't do anything on you look at it oh that's like ajay pic looks great but you can't do a thing to it bit depth is how much support you have below every color this represented in a photograph the morbid depth you have, the more support you've got fourteen bit it's like having two feet of concrete twelve feet twelve it might be like having eight inches of concrete or whatever sixteen bit would be like having four feet of concrete or whatever there is I don't know exactly analogy here but I can tell you this thirty two bits like having two miles of concrete that's the mathematical jump so when you work on an image you want to work in the most debated depth that you khun you know, did you work it now when I captured a fourteen bit camera image I bring in a photo shop I work in a sixteen but environment I'm not converting that image into sixteen bit I'm working in a fourteen bit image and sixteen but environment but still you don't want to go and work in an eight bit environment you want to work in the biggest environment bet deaf you can, so I've been doing a lot of thirty two bit hdr images why? Because I have two miles of concrete supporting it I get my image the way I want it then I go to sixteen bit so that's one thing you need to know bit depth raw you work in light room or bridge as a bridge you work out a bridge into camera adobe raw to manipulate your image the mormon mitt bid after you have the more you have to put fiddle with that image and return in treating shadow detail highlights all your tones, everything when you work in photo shop, you want to work with adjustment layers, smart objects, things that help minimize destruction so when you watch me work, I'm going to show you the best I know in terms of minimizing the and I'm not a finisher re toucher that is hired by companies or even other photographers. I do my own work and I've learned quite a bit, but I'm not a photo shop expert, but I know quite a bit in terms of where I need to get to and that's enough, right? So um if you watch me work and there's, some people in the audience may go you know he's doing something wrong because I'm not perfect in what I do but I'm going to show you what I do and that's the best I can give you and I've been doing this a long time and if you go to photoshopped adobe photo shop and on their photo shop age they have the influencers they have me on their why is that because I'm the best retouching on the planet no because I'm building content I'm an artist so the best that I can do is be an artist not a technician I'm not very good at being a technician in terms of I hope I'm here because I'm an artist and that's what I'm going to show you is how I work my magic all right since I had my hard drive was not that let me download any images of by backgrounds which is really not very fun I'm going to show you the image that I want to drop our composite into and so and this is the best I can do folks this may not be the marriage that I would have for this image of what we just shot but where's my let's go over here so it za death valley image so let's see what we can do here and again I apologize because I had a whole bunch of background just we just before we started here I dumped one and crash the whole system so something's not right there and hopefully we'll solve that problem but in great so let's go down we have a whole book cool stuff here we did and, um we're going to bypass all these these air great stuff we could do I could re touch and we'll see how much time we have but I want to get to a composite um so let's get down to and actually we could probably do say one of these images um something like this but I think since we went to all that work for the headdress let's do a head dress one and I just picked a couple literally as we were firing up the you know, getting online here getting alive so here's one that looks pretty good she's kind of looking off so there she's got her eyes toward me um I would say and there's across light one no no it's not you know it's the same that's kind of cool there. Um so I gotta pick one I like that one there too. So I just grabbed a couple here real quick of her but I think for simplicity I kind of like this something like that let me just look at one other reappear um so that's showing I think I like that better that's probably the best one for now, so I'm going to open this image in camera adobe raw and I'm gonna begin the simple the way joel right? I do it all the time, right? So I'm just gonna walk through so here we have it the shortcut to open raw for me and you could, by the way, do this in light room. I don't work in light room, I'd like to be able to start working from light room, but here it is. Command are brings me into camera adobe raw and I've got all sorts of options here. The first thing I do is retrieve some of the shadow detail and I pulled back a little bit of highlight detail. There's not a lot of problems with the highlight your eyes see, that may be the top of the the feathers here, the white um, you know, we're blowing out just a little bit, so I pulled that I'm gonna pull a little bit of contrast out because I can always add contrast later and this is you gotta be careful, but I can pull a little bit of clarity. Just a tad bit of clarity is take a look at it, you want to go too far on it because that's going to, you know, we want to grunge upper skin too much, okay, so there is the, um, basic recovery and settings that I would do in the camera adobe raw I'm going to however open as a smart object and to do that and get I don't want to get too much into your I have checkmark open in a photo shop as a smart object so that every time I open an image it goes to a smart object if I don't want it I just hold on the ship if you don't have that click you hold the shift in open is a smart objects here we go open is a smart object here we are and you can see that this little icon right over here tells me I'm in a smart object we're going to duplicate that image does not do it but I want oh still keep it uh raw independent from each other so I'm going to right click it and say new smart object be a copy again I've covered this all on my creative live in the last workshop we're going double click on it we're going to it brings on being back in adobe camera we're going to go to the black and white which is the h s l slash grace l scale uh dialog box here I'm going to now manipulate my skin tones now cliff we were talking about this the other day and for a mathlete I would move it whips holen convert move it the orange in this direction dark in the skin tones for a female beauty, I usually go the other way. I don't want to far but I can smooth out the skin a little bit here. Let's, take a look at my yellow. Does that's going to smooth out the hair, bring out some detail. They're blue. What does blue do? Nothing. What does aqua do? Nothing green probably does nothing. Okay, so really it's the orange and yellow the red might do a little bit special feathers there. Yeah, a little bit brings out some detail, but I want to push it too far, but I'm not locked into this, so I'm going to say okay, it's now going to show me the black and white is the layer above and I'm going to apply a blending mode now for years I've done just soft light. Okay. That's a pretty good that's the beginning of my joel grimes look right there, however, my son aaron showed me that I could go toe luminosity and what luminosity does it applies the black and white filter pack to the image a black and white filter pack but keeps it in color. So look what happens boom boom! It lightens it up, but it doesn't change it to black and white, and they want to do is I do command j which gives me a duplicate layer I take that top one too soft light now I got both I've got the ability to apply a little bit of a black and white look, which is right there, which is what I've done for years, but I had this ability to smooth out the skin a little bit more, so I'm gonna take this down about oh half and we'll take this uh, the soft light one down about half something actually kind of splitting between the two that's a good a place for me with this shot beauty fashion we could blow it up a little bit here, you can see all right, so now that gives me three layers there. Now I can flatten this or I can make a stamp of all these dis preserve all these in case I'm not quite sure I'm committed, but I think what we're to do right now well, let's just flatten it and that puts the ring on the finger I now commit and move on and I want to do a little clean up on the face not bad here and we're not doing a beauty necessarily retouch on this, but I'm going to quickly go to layers the bottom layer I'm goingto put low top layer we're going to do high this is a frequency separation technique on the bottom layer we're going to apply a homeland of second gonna slide this just a little bit here so I get to the top we're gonna apply a noise dustin scratches and we're gonna default to fifteen that's where I left it last time that's a pretty good place for me well apply that now you don't see it because I've got a layer up above so let's take it off there is my destin scratches applied you'd do that would blur too and there's a bunch of different techniques out there folks but so that on the high one I want to take this and do a image apply image and I want to take the source down too holland there it is that the source the layer down too low I want to set my blending mode to subtract and then the scales to the offset is one twenty eight now I had people emailed me say look you khun invert it goto ad and change some things and that works with sixteen and that's what I mean I don't know again this is what I'm going off of what I've been doing so now we have what looks like a high pass layer here we're going to set the bloody mode too linear light now I'm going to group this so I select my to do commanded g group's it and that's going to be my skin retouching part and above that I'm going to apply a adjustment layer, mom button right here to black and white. And I'm gonna take the the slider red slider to the right. This reveals all the flaws. Now, if your models in the room this doesn't, this is just for reference. This is not for flattery, ok, but that gives me an idea of where the pores and the ones I want to get rid of. So let's, go open that group up, and I want to go to the high and I want to come over here and I want to pick up the healing brush tool, and I want to, um, zoom in here and let's just do something like this, okay? Um, the biggest, darkest spots may not completely, um, sort of get taken out with this technique, but this gives me ability. Take out things that leave all the texture to the skin. Now get were that were on the black and white version. So I'm gonna I'm gonna stamp it with my option, just like I would do a cloning I'm gonna stamp and then come over here and take it out. So, here's, how I end up cleaning up all the skinless sea that we that does that one sometimes it doesn't take him all the way out but but we don't want to go out every flaw right because you know we're human right we don't want to end up with a mannequin but this technique really gives me the ability to depending where I stamp it uh still keep the skin tone texture so I don't end up with the bull cosy and blur mannequin okay, so let's go up in here this is where is going to show the most so let's start down here and I'm just going to come along here and pick up some things and I've covered this all before on my other workshop and I'm going to just come along here and a super expert re toucher may go job what do you doing but this is what I've kind of come to know and again I want to show you something real quick watch what happened won't take it off see I'm showing it majorly exaggerated here does that make sense? Yes you guys asleep okay so I'm coming along here and this I'm going pretty damn fast and I make a couple mistakes because I'm going so fast but I want to do a general clean up here and there's some still some issues with this you know skin but I'm going to fix that in a minute so I'm doing a general clean up and let me just tell you something the that edge light technique that I use really exaggerates any flaw and scanned you when you saw her in person and she looked amazing, right? But when you put across edge light across the skin, it really starts toe show any problems, okay, I'm going to be careful because I don't want to overdo this and I'm just trying to grab around here, okay? That's not that again I'm working on exaggerated layer here, so let's, go up here and fix those, but you could see how fast I'm going. I this could be a no, there wasn't that I didn't have a class a ten minute retouch doesn't make sense. We're not gonna spend a lot of time on this and also think about it. This is kind of backed up it's not like a really tight shot, okay, so we're on click this and we could see already that looks pretty darn good, okay, but I'm not done yet. We're gonna go down to the low player. We're going to take the class tool and I'm gonna circle in area here's a little bit of an area that's got that hole on this desk too much a little bit of a flaw there, I'm gonna come up to my blur so filter blur gods in blur and I'm gonna ply about a thirty ish somewhere around thirty ish radius okay and I say d d select see how that clean that up so here's another little flaw right here that's going to pick that up and since photoshopped allows you to go to the last setting which is filter gazi blur all have to do is command f command d has done see that washes command f command e done this little spot command f command e done there's a little spot right there command after mandy done I'm going to fix that in a minute let's try that one again um here's a little bump right there command after mandy was a little bit there so I'm just going through can clean up some little issues now there's a little bit of stuff here so let's just see what we can do here I'm gonna pick that spot up there command f command e c how that clean it up and this is all pretty darn fast I mean I'm not you know again train if I was doing on my own I might spend a little more time let's try that one again here okay so and let's go back to the top one here I could see I need to fix this a little bit here spot healing brush so I clone it clean it up clone clean that up there you got a spot their spot there did you get the point right? Okay, we're done there anything else look on my black and white layer we're not done so I'm a close at because I have I'm gonna make a blank layer shift command and we're going to set the mod blending moto overlay and don't just click check mark the phil uh overlay with neutral color fifty percent grey say okay now this is gonna be my dodge and burns so what? We just put my d be dodging burn and there's so many different ways to dodge and burn this is the way I do it when I just have to do a basic general dodge and burn I'm gonna go to my dodge three percent mid tones exposure three percent really light let's go the black and white back on and now well, you can see that I've got a little hot spot their little dark but they're so by holding down the all option button it will toggle between the dodge and burn so right now I'm on dodge okay? And I just pushed this down I'm gonna burn mode I'm gonna burn along here a little bit I'm gonna burn right along here here I'm gonna dodge right there and there's a line right there we're gonna fix that I can fix that in a minute but I want to try to get it with my dodge and burn little spot here I'm still dodging a little bit here um what else take that out and when to burn right there right a little bit of a highlight right there on the lip okay but no more dodge are they burn and then we're gonna dodge that back well don't just were on the black and white layer right so watch what happens when I click it off but look how much better she looks already okay and then what I do is I know this sounds crazy but all the times I go down low oh really small go back to my dodge and burn here and I can see like this jaw we want a little bit of highlight on it but I'm just going to smooth it out here a little bit there what's too much backtrack command z so I'm gonna burn a little bit there I'm gonna bring this back just a little bit there is a little bit of a hot spot right there because I can see it better when it's small that makes sense there's a little bit of ah spot right there we're gonna take that out and then let's look down here got a little couple little spots along here again I could spend a lot more time on this but you get the point when I'm doing um so now let's take the black and white off she looks great wow okay, now let me just clean up her eyes just a little bit not much because I don't want you know I see these pictures where you know the eyes looked like they're glowing, you know? So I don't want that but I do want to make an adjustment layer levels and I'm gonna come over here and I'm gonna take my brush and we're going to set it to black and I'm going to go hundred percent I wanna make sure soft yes it is soft and I'm gonna come in here I'm just gonna go like this it's a little smaller here we're gonna punch a hole right through that white you don't see anything happening right yet we're gonna punch a hole right through here one percent flow hundred percent capacity right now I have a hold on hold on, hold on. Whoa joel joel joel hold back! I'm gonna invert that's I click on the mask command I now I flipped it now I'm on ly going to affect the eyeballs click here in the crown thing and watch what happens. See that? So the best way to just the eyes is you go small because if you go in close you get you know, somehow your brain doesn't absorb it right? So I'm gonna have a little bit of contrast in her eyes just a tad and maybe like I said, open it up just a little bit so this is one hundred one point zero zero is normal and I'm gonna open it up I'm going the right way yeah maybe to about ten or fifteen right there well eighteen so now when I zoom in her eyes still look pretty good I mean they're not overly died right now that layer and believe there for right now well we're going to we're going to fix it a minute but that that gives me an idea that I think everything else looks pretty good we're gonna have to cut knock her out so I'm gonna have to flatten flatten it but do a stamp here in a minute but that looks pretty good if anything I would probably maybe build the contrast just a tad more see the little history graham here I might go toe ooh that's going too far I think so I could do this and go back to one and then go just just contrasts what that looks like that's not bad I'm not going too far let's go back down here and take this back to back out there right so that's just my eyes now that's a beauty remember cliff we're talking about that's the beauty of masking I can isolate anything and I could do from color balance I could actually make her eyes change color by doing this with adjustment layers and I'm not going to do that but let's do this we're gonna get rid of our black and white layer I'm going to take now and de saturate my image slightly, which is something I do on every image and I'm going to take about a minus ten to twelve on the master take the red the reds to about minus ten ish and the yellows tum out the same some around there that cleans up my skin tones and that's just the way I do it because I am color blind and this is what I've come up with in that's what served me well so far so I do that on every image, so I am now ready before I go and do my extraction, which I'm gonna do for you in a minute here let's take if there's anything that I want to fix with my liquefy on do it now so I'm gonna make a snapshot of all the it's layers before I don't want to get rid of them yet because that that might be a disaster because if I noticed something tomorrow morning when I wake up, I don't want to do that, so I'm gonna go shift ault for option command e gives me a snapshot is collected all those down and made into one now I goto liquefy liquefy is my friend if I could do this in real life, I'd be a billionaire, but I'm gonna come over here and I'm gonna push her arm and just a little bit see that I'm not going to make it look like she's you know a twig, but I do want to just push that in and my rule of thumb is that if I do something for a model and she says thank you joel, then I've done good if I do some for a model she says that's not me then I'm in trouble, I've gone too far doesn't make sense I want them to be happy, so let me take a look around I'm gonna look at the hair over here and I'm gonna take and I'm gonna show you if I go over here um and I take and apply what this thing's doing, we're stuff a mask on her face I don't want to touch that and then I go over here to my push tool I can now oh, this thing is just like, I'm gonna be able to push this in a little bit here and I don't affect the faces that you see what I'm doing so I can shape the hair a little bit here and that looks okay maybe it's a little bit too much pushed out there. Okay, what do you think that helped a little bit, um, anything else? Oh, she may say, you know what, I don't like the little bumps on my shoulder fix that and I think all my feathers looked pretty good nothing there maybe I might push this in just a little bit right here. Just a shape that top looks good, it's ok, I do that before I do my mask cut out, I can do it afterwards own if we don't, I do it afterwards, but I have to go back in, apply the setting on the mass so I do it on the image that I go to the mask and I say, just apply the same settings and that's new and I think cs six and now a sec. All right, so I am now ready for the cut out here's the fun part, folks. And this is where everybody says, um they have problems. Well, there's, no such thing as a perfect cut out and a perfect cut out does not sell the fake. You want to get the best cut out? You can, but what sells a fake in the mood? The overall mood you go and zoom on this guy over here, vincent. And you look in there and there's gonna be a little things that you say not quite perfect, who cares? I mean, if you're doing it for a client, you want to do the best you can, but the fact is at perfect cut up doesn't sell the frank it's the overall mood of the whole amy's being put together that sells a fake I'm gonna show you some things hopefully here this is gonna be a challenge on this this is not gonna be easy cut out here usually when I do a teaching scenario I never do anything this difficult but I got kind of caught into this one here so here we go we're just gonna come along here and we're gonna come along and when it comes to the hair here I wanna show you what I have to dio I am hitting plus and nothing's happening come on, blow up here we'll put this down because that might have been affecting you know, I think it was hitting the you want to come in wherever there's air coming through hair air you see through the hair you want to go and not make a selection so right here I'm gonna let thor or shop pick it now in here I'm gonna have a problem I'm not gonna worry about that now when it comes to the feathers I look at the feathers wherever there's air coming through I'm gonna let my photo shop do it okay someone come along here and again this is going to be tough but it's not impossible I could actually come all the way out here like that I can come all the way out here that and so this takes a little bit more time than normal most of my cut outs take about at most ten minutes at most now I went too far here so I hold down the sorry the option all to come back on it I actually gotta move around here let's get her let's get it over here we got some good stuff going on here it's gonna be a challenge you know, people going to say joel has been pulling our leg the whole time he doesn't know what he's doing here but now this little part here I'm not gonna worry about it right now so there's a point in which wo I just it's good you're gonna have to you're gonna have to go and fix it now I am not worried about that because there's this thing called a mask and I'm going to be able to manipulate that mask later okay so right there let's take this and go back there's some fuzzy little things that I want to make sure photoshopped does that not me yes I can't see you know what it is just a plain old quick selection like ok yeah ok so again this is probably about as complex as I get when it comes to a mask look at my portfolio I do have some hair blowing and I have come up some techniques that I can help you get that but for the most part most of my portrait ce are like this pretty darn easy and so that goes back to this while we're grabbing us. I'm going to tell you a little secret this will save you from ending up with no hair like me and that is if you have an attention span of ten minutes don't build the bodywork that takes three hours to retouch if you have attention span of three hours, don't build a body of work that takes three days to retouch I have an attention span of three hours that's the max give me over three hours I start to get bunkers, so I have built a whole look based on a rita that's about three hours of max doesn't make sense so that's a simple retouch that's about a two hour to hour retouch the really go in there and do your thing. I don't go and build a body work that takes three days to retouch it would kill me so you can rock the world with whatever with whatever your attention span is if your attention span is ten minutes, bill the body work that you can retouch in ten minutes and rock the world with it. So, um, that's the beauty of what we have, you can actually go out and create a look and rock the world with him in it retouch it doesn't get that complex these composites take a little bit of work okay we got a little problem here there's some gray in between here and right now it's pretty much impossible for me to pick that up inside here I can try to do this and I don't think it's gonna work we'll we'll try it this is a really tough but I'm going to take in clone a bunch of feathers and phil ident does that make sense so then I'm not locked into that so let's go over here I think we're in here on the air that looks pretty good a limit of problems there I'm not gonna worry about this that much here we go ready so there's a little section right there so let me just back down and there's some fuzzy stuff down here that's good that's good I'm gonna pick that up with photo shop but let me come to the edge of it this is a good example I'm picking up to where there's solid pixels and then they're here on them let photoshopped to it all right ready come on not doing it let's go to refine edge to see the top here it says we find if you click off of that little quickly select tool you'll lose that little button so make sure that you are the quick select it refine edge it comes up a dialogue right here you automatically go to the ed detection but brush you don't have to go find it it's already there it's defaulted so I'm not gonna touch any of these things right now, right? Most people dio I don't watch what happens I'm going come along here I'm gonna pick up now if I go into a situation a scenario like this and let's say this is for an ad campaign and I had had john hold up the black behind it that would this would make a little bit better but we didn't do that on this I don't believe me we did I guess we did but if I had to go back to another image to pull out every little bit of this detail I hopefully and covered but right now I'm going to run it on the edges here and I'm gonna try to pick up every little bit I can that might pick up it may not question yes question came in earlier from rob strong who wanted to know about why you prefer to shoot on the white or the gray rather than just throwing the black up there for the whole shoot and then a question just came in regarding green screen tony gambino wanted to know why don't you just use a green screen for punching out backgrounds? Ok, good question all those questions and get that question every time I teach so here's why number one I want to buy a new car went down the dealership I want a grey I came home with a greek green car why did I go home with the green heart that I want a green car no I wanted a great car but I'm color blind I don't see greed so why would I go and pick a green screen scenario what I don't see green because when I go to knock it out later I got green all over the place that's number one number two is is often when you use a green screen or a blue screen you get the color contaminant coming into your frame like on the skin tones so you would end up with a little bit of green along here and I can't see that so that would be like the worst case scenario is me going and using a green screen now there are some programs coming out that really help solve all this for us maybe you know that really make it and that's great if there's a way to do green screen and it like rocks and it does sign me up I hate this but white gray those values make it fairly easy to knock out it is possible and so I would say that probably ninety percent of the photographers I know ninety eight percent of the flavors I know I'll do it on a white or gray so if you're if you're if you're going to see your portrait sor kids, little baseball teams and you want to run them all through like cattle and you will pop on green screen pop on greece came. Just put a background in it. Fine, but for this kind of stuff, I don't think the green screen really works in the same for black. Black is casting too much. No black would not. But why? Why would you choose? Well, black would have a really hard time along here. His feathers. So you over here, you would not be able to pick it up, right? Well, so, um, so here we are. Now, if you look at the adjustment edge, this is the ability to shrink your edge or expand your smoother and sharpen your edge. I don't touch that. All I want right now is to go new layer with mask and I say, okay, here we go. Now I have being see where I did the he's picking up his bottom one here but let's, just do this, okay? There is my image knocked out as best I can. It's. Not perfect. And I know it's not perfect. I'm not worried about it.