Lessons

Lesson Info

Retouching Meeting With Aaron Nace

The first thing we're gonna do is we're going to go through the notes from the last two days of shooting we need to sit down pat and aaron and I and talk about the files that we exported, why we exported them and patent and I kind of need to convey to aaron exactly what we want to do with these images because I have no idea, you know, I don't really don't have any idea what way spelled out for you, right zero idea is right there what are we all right? So we did uh you guys photograph bud light and cab beaky right? What we're doing first today, why don't we do this? Why don't we are we're going to retouch your beaky first, okay? Why don't we talk about the bud light images great what we want to do there while pat is still here because he's got a jet off to new york for yet another event so before he takes off of the brake, why don't we go ahead and we'll go through the bud light bottles? We'll talk about that, then we'll go to the hub iki notes will actually talk about those and go righ...

t into re touching that yeah she's perfect good all right, so we're here in the exports, which are you guys this select okay, perfect well, just go ahead open these up and can we also float the notes here by chance yes for the bud light yeah don't have to like do a split screen here but oh hell we can do that then eh no big deal I don't have the internet one right right here okay so as always we have our first file number which will start off telling us what that bottles for so that one is not when we need we just uh never go so we can see what we're gonna do that I got away before we go okay so that is for the right bottle body so for this one we really liked what was going on on the inside so the liquid with the exception of the label the label's really you know kind of it's backlit it's glowing the platen from the inside which is totally weird but there's some good stuff going on on the interior of the bottle so that's what we're gonna want for that okay perfect eight five yeah now that was going to be for the edges because obviously that silver card is blowing out all the slush and and spritz on the right side on the edges so we want to use this guy in order to bring those edges back plus we like what's going on with the bud light and the platinum logo in the center that looks really good so we're going to merge those two bottles together right, perfect. Alright then eight eight eight eight is for the right bottleneck label um and the neck of the bottle we had to shift the focus a little bit we're very low we even though we're shooting an f thirteen we've got a long way to go with the set so we have to merge those two together in terms of getting the knack for focus and we've got to straighten out the neckar label because obviously it's crooked all right and then we've got eight six eight six is for an edge option on the left edge of the right bottle so just in case we needed a little bit more bump on that left edge we've got it there okay? Yes just back up it's a backup you guys went through during the shooting actually labeled these as you're shooting as always yeah, we have to if we don't or in deep weeds without the amount of images that we shoot okay, so then our next one is for the left bottom we're starting out with uh oh nine o and that's basically the base of that left bottle s oh, that would be the edges right left side uh left bottle glow so that's going to be the interior guy? Okay um a platinum on body label so again that's going to be the bud light platinum in the middle I know what this one pat bud lights looking a little weak there in terms of exposure. So we're gonna wanna match the bud light logo itself to what's going on on the right bottle in terms of exposure, we're gonna have to bring that up a little bit perfect ization match. We've got another one for the neck and we're gonna have to root, you know, straighten that as well. Things always cooking way don't live in a perfect world. Okay, photo jobs for making things that you think I'm for real okay it's a left beer. Poor yes, that's for the beer glass, right? So we've got we have the same god. We only have one glass on this, which is pretty unusual for one of my chutes. We only have one glass. We've put it on left side and we had to move it and put it on the right side. So that's going to be for the left beer, poor and head but actually, that is truly for just ahead. Okay hand just going to think this was going to be for the body over the body. So we've got the bubbles coming up a little bit of effervescence in there and they were going to drop that head on top of it yeah, yes, like we're killing that like the shadow right there underneath the head yeah that because we're looking at the bottom of the head we're seeing that lips go around and we don't want that which is why the other glass is filled almost all the way up so that you can take that liquid all the way up here you can drop the head on and we're just gonna go ahead front room I can lose the back we're gonna brighten that head up a little bit probably okay great and then one six six yep eso won six sixes for the head on the front and then that's for the body that's pretty sweet yeah, I'm a little concerned pat how do you feel about doubt you had down there like the lightening up a little and color matches its flames yeah it's definitely a little bit off yeah sounds good instant problem you should get that done in about six minutes if you do that in six minutes we're gonna have a lot of time to phil we're going dead airman well there's a whole thing I've got to explain it to you oh yeah yeah so it takes a bit longer okay, so the next let's go through the hang onto we export carrie do we export any of the stars? Okay, I'll just make a photo shop all right? You're killing me? Yeah, well, I'm I'm actually really going teo use what I made my will my will okay, so how big he is next to guess. Hobbies next year? Perfect. I'll write it and we're back on one one seven. Okay. Okay, so one, one seven that is gonna be our base file for the bottle body, the cap in the bottom and reflection. Okay, so basically, the lower part of the of the bottle what's going on with the cap and then any of the reflection down here that we might want although I'm pretty sure that there's a stronger woman than that okay, that might be mislabeled to tell you truth uh, that's for a neck for the neck. Yeah, the neck label because I think was totally broken. Oh, yeah. Okay. Time. That was another one to kick in for neck just on the far left edge just to get the gold to kind of popular. Um, okay. So the hubby key in the middle it's his age twelve years that aged in the one. This is for that side. We put a gold card to reflect for aged at one when we put it on the opposite side and we have another one for twelve years. I've gone to in the years. Yeah, so we got emerge those together to get that to come out perfect, okay, right edge, okay, so we wanted moving lights around a little bit I did some handheld lights in here in order to get some light to kind of pop in there I do like this but when patton we're going over it in post we were thinking about we might want to grab the highlights were coming up for the right edge and we might just want to flip him and duplicate him onto the left side ok? Because that's really pretty the facets are there twenty facets of thirty facets on this bottom remember I was twenty twenty was more I thought it was twenty four twenty four and they all have a meaning like specific meaning so one of things we want to do in post with you is really kind of highlight those facets there is a thin we put a thin highlight going upon the one facet we're gonna want to replicate that or make it make it more so going back across the next three right on makes sense we could bring that bottle appears we could see what we want to highlight absolutely horrible idea now it wouldn't be a bad idea to drink all of that last night no way you didn't drink all of it not all of this snow some apple juice just time it goes down like apple juice a way could put in and gary sippy cup you want a sippy cup for whiskey I think it's already filled with whiskey and then we need the background file. We got that somewhere. Oh, no, there we go. We need that guy to so that that glass is pretty yeah, showing the fastest there let's zoom in on that so we could steal from there too. Keep in mind we want you know, I don't want to go super glowy on the inside of this bottle. I really don't because this is supposed to be more of a night time setting it's actually, maybe pat that's something you should guide us on because I kind of liked it a little bit dark and bring some of those facets in you are more than welcome to use some of the stuff that's going on in here to kind of exploit those facets. This was really for the glass to get the, you know, the ice to pop out it's a pretty unusual glass in that it's smoked, you know, it's smoked and mirrored on the top school. Yeah, it's kind of interesting, so we're gonna want to get that to pop this one. I'm just holding the card in there so you see the reflection of my hand. The next file that we selected has the dark edge, which would you know, I wanted to have that kind of dark feel and I love that the bottle is kind of reflecting in it yeah that's really night we did shoot it back up without the bottle in there just in case but I like it with it but that's gonna be your call pat make it count all right looks great. Um yeah, any additional comments? So the uh bud light we're gonna be doing first and then we're gonna have a break and then come back now we're gonna we're gonna stick on her beaky now that we just went over those notes we're gonna go right to it right to the bbc okay, great. And do we have the background file somewhere we'd better have the background file send it to this computer. Oh, great. That sounds get the back yes. What about the one that he had already retouched he said he's going to rebuild it I was rebuild it I have no idea where the files are way. All right, perfect it's just not my computer I don't know what's going on here is a computer waiting photoshopped I don't know what's going on three folders above yes, here we go. I just want I just told you that. Ok, perfect. So we're gonna go ahead and we've got two files because we've got to create a vertical and a horizontal of it yes sounds good let's do that okay let's go ahead and bring in what we've got from the from the exports here in the big key okay, that will give all of this time to get our minds wrapped around what we have to do with the back plate and, uh, well, go ahead and build that, okay, we can cut everything out and then go ahead and get the back plate from that. So I think you guys concede that even just in the preparation to go into retouching there's a lot, to go back over and to think about, you know, obviously a ton went into the planning of the photo shoot a lot of the time that details that we time that we spent on the details of making this stuff all happen. Now we've got to make sure that we go back and we don't miss anything. We sit down and talk with aaron it's it's kind of a laborious process, but it's, the way that we're gonna make just an absolutely awesome hero image least I hope we are yeah, how do we know we got aaron? A lot of pressure off of retail hot tony hawk is much more badass and me, I'll tell you that much we're we're gonna get you those little shoes, they have the pop out, I want you there, there, have it by the end of the day way make that happen, whether things called, we leave tony, you gotta question rob just you mentioned the other day I don't remember it was on camera offline that clients are more and more requesting the raw files thes days from yes, when you're doing a major composite like this, assume that's kind of out the window in a situation like this, you know, here's here's the thing I still feel extremely responsible for the end result, even though I don't get to retouch a lot of as a photographer as a studio there's no question, I want to have the ability to execute this image to my eye, my eye, and I want to fully execute my vision. The reason we have to give out raw files is a lot of ad agencies have in house production it's honestly it's a way for them to make more money. They do so much production on all this stuff anyway when they outsource it it's a major expense so many large ad agencies build an in house production team, so they've got their own retouch er's and they want to do that they can help keep their costs down, and eventually they you know that that allows them to have more money to do more for their clients, so we often have to turn over the whole kit and caboodle of files in terms of what we've exported, so the notes that we send to them are even more detailed, you know, here we kind of abbreviate everything that we're doing, uh, we do the same thing, but just in a little bit more detail and send that whole package to them, and I often sit down with on a phone call with their retouch er's and say, okay, here's, what we're doing if you have any questions, let's, go through it now and we sit down and talk about it because again, I feel responsible for it, even though I'm turning over the files if they mess it up, it's their it's kind of like on them, but it's my images, so I want to do everything I can to make make that process easy for them, and they really appreciate that because they're a lot of photographers who just turned over and files and then they're re touches are sitting there going, okay, what am I doing with all this? They went up having to call the art director of the creative director to come down and sit with them, and they have to try to figure out what happened on set and what all these files are for if you spell it out for them, you really helped save a lot of time and money, you know? So it's essentially just a more elaborate description an explanation same thing you're doing errands for them you are you giving them tiffs or are you actually giving on the raw files out of the house here now we're giving them tips I don't want to give them necessarily the raw files unless I have to, um some of their rita cher's do want to have the raw file because they can push it a little bit further. I prefer to give them the tips it was the raw files out of the hasi they have tohave focus in orderto work with um there are a couple of researchers that I work with who I have downloaded, you know, focus on my account so that they can work from those raw hassi files and then play with him you can work with with hostile files now in light room um what you just did to me it's better to work with it and focus so we tried teo on ly provide tiffs sometimes we do sixteen but if sometimes we do a pit tips it depends on what the end result is going to be when they need a larger file we give him the sixteen bit so they have more information to start with and then they can kind of noodle it from there um so it's it's a lot that answer your question it does thank you thoroughly thoroughly right on you don't want to go ahead and open these up yeah, I'm going okay, so what we're gonna do is we're going to go ahead and, uh we're going to load these into a stack because it's basically the best way when we have a ton of files instead of just opening individually going open up into a stack it's going to kind of do it all for you're gonna do photoshopped focus back uh second but there's a stack stack just your regular old during the meal stack that'd be awesome if the pull down said running milk right? They're all running the mail stack to get to there just go to file down here to script and load files into stack so basically it's goingto load what's going to become layers you could just hit this brows key right here and then you're going to be finding where you're at so we're going to do to her beaky first yes, we are gonna go do our exports and then you could just hit command a select all your files that you want together it's open button they're going to kind of like load up there, you can have it automatically align your source images, which is not a horrible idea I'm going to do that separately just because it's gonna show you guys how to do that just in case you didn't so you find there's some problems with the automatic alignment uh, it really works about the same this just for creative life it's going to do it would do two steps at the same time, which I think it just be better to show these guys how to do it in case you didn't do this that make any sense? No, you got us all corn fun. It makes no sense, all right? You can automatically alana source images within this dialogue, but just in case you didn't do this or you put your images together in a different way, I'm going to show you how to do it for every different dialogue as well. So we're gonna hit okay? And basically just kind of thanks for a little bit, depending on how fast her computer is and how big your files are but it's just going to open up all these files and then stick them into one document, which is what we've got right here. So instead of like going to command o and the dragon together in commando, we've got we've got all the files here, which is really nice, so I didn't align them all by source align the source images so what we can do now is just shift, click all these layers and go to edit and then auto align layers so you can do this with him within this is well for this I would recommend doing auto and the reason why I want to do this at the very beginning is I mean you got shot on a tripod and hopefully nothing moved but things still tend to move even if you don't you know if you don't intend to big clumsy feet can kick stand all that kind of stuff you're here all right I got tio we're going ok and it's basically just going to do its job now we get tau wait and sometimes it doesn't do anything at all but it's just a good way to do it just in case because we're going to be using basically layer masks to bring all these things together and I don't want to like, you know, transform and warp and move every single you know I don't want to do that every single time so this is it basically takes care of all the all the work for us so at this point what were just doing is we're going to lay a massive he's in and out you guys going to see it just the bottles itself it's going to be a relatively quick process of deciding what we want in and what we wanted you know as I'm sitting here looking at this I don't think I mentioned that again the beaky label it's quick and easy production so they gotta go yeah can you talk about the production thing you just said? Yeah, way did cover that before, but, you know, very often we have to wind up using production bottles. Uh, and those labels were put on by machine we really prefer to do is get hero labels from the clients, which isn't always available either time constraints or they're not printed or whatever is going on. So sometimes we have to use straight production stuff and those air always cooking the machines just never put him on straight. They're going through a high speed and they come through absolutely whirling one. The other things that you'll see in a lot of bottles is not on the high beaky, but it's on almost every other bottle. There is a little gripper at the back, so if you look at a bottle there's kind of this weird little indentation kind of low in the bottom of the bottle that's a gripper that helps the bottle go through the factory, it grabs it and it, you know, sends it down the line so that that little thing kind of helps indicate where the bottle needs to be as it goes through one label after the next, but they're never exactly perfect it's, you know, it's mechanical, so if we can, we really prefer to be able to completely stripped the bottle and put our own on