Lessons

Lesson Info

Compositing Headdress and Details

well guys we're going to start off in light room and review the shots that we took during our second segment today and so we've already photographed our model we've talked about how to actually light someone to match them into the background and we've got got her on green screen and basically all we need to do now we've created the background we just needed take her and place or into the background and then create that cool glowing orb effect so usually what I'll do is bring my images into light room just like we've already done here and then basically just hit flag a couple so hit p for pick on the images that I actually like and now we're just going to filter these by the actual flag so let's go ahead and filter this there we go and these are the images that I thought would work pretty well so let's just double click and go through each of these images you can see we started off a little bit less let's animated you know I think that kind of like working with rachel and saying like ok...

ay now you can kind of like move around and kind of interact with the light I think that really helped out it gave her a little bit of more freedom and so when you guys were working with your models even with the composite keep in mind your subject has to be interesting like it's you want an interesting background but again your subject is going to be most of the time of the most important part of these images so just kind of looking through them way do have a lot of really interesting shots in here so if we have let's say we had an hour and a half to do this I would probably bring in three or four different image is my favorite images and use those as you know as the images we actually decided on for editorial so we might bring we might bring into images and do this really quickly so while we regard the in studio audience voted that three three five one was a really good image I'm gonna hit the number five on that and that's going to set the rating to five so not only did I flag jesus picks but now that I said the rating to five if I want to refine that selection even further it's really used to do which I'll show you how it just a little bit so bringing these in what do you guys think I'll give you I'll give you guys a couple of different options we can have all right so I've labelled three it's five stars so if I want to condense that even farther all I have to do is click on this five star I'm gonna shift click the three those and hit the end key and is in nice last name on and we're going to kind of take a look at these so this is the middle one is our in studio vote and then I guess I'll put it to the institute which other one would you like to see me inserting the image this one here on the right side okay great so we'll do both of those and all right so basically what I'm gonna do and you khun there are many different ways that you guys can go about getting these in the photo shop basically I'm just going to right click on this and I'm going say show in finder there we go and I'm gonna write click here and I'm going to go toe open with and we're going to just go down the photo shop and since this is a d n g it's a it's a raw file rather it's going to give me the adobe camera raw and we can adjust these settings if we want to basically adjusting each of the different color ranges and our exposure and things like that I think we're okay here for the most part I generally will leave this as isn't into my adjustments in a photo shop one of the benefits of editing in this dialogue is your editing still in sixteen bit and then once you edit it open it in photo shop it'll convert into eight bit all right if I didn't want to bring in do my color correction a little bit let's see we've got our huge saturation us grace slash grace go I will take my saturation and you know what I just said I wasn't going out of this but I I I'm gonna take my blues down just a little bit the saturation of those blues because I know I'm going to wind up de saturated my background a little bit so I want that kind of like match there and these oranges I really wantto pump those up because I find you know this that's kind of like the interesting part of the photo shoot to me all right so the oranges blues and the reds all right there we go let's go ahead and hit open image okay and it's going to stick this here in photo shop so let's go ahead and just do the same thing with the other one now we're only gonna wind up working on one of these images but I do want to put them both into into the image just kind of show you like this is it's part of the process like it's it's really common this is you know why we composite right we want as many options as possible so why the reason why we composite a lot of the time is because wait do you want these options even after we are completed with our photo shoot all right so let's open that as well okay so bring this in to the background that we created in our last segment all we have to do is hold down the shift key while using moved to move to and click and drag from one image over to the other one okay so let's go ahead and close this down we don't need it anymore okay and we're gonna click and drag this image as well and close that down as well there we go okay now we're gonna hit after full screen so this is it should be a relatively simple process here let's just go ahead and shift quick please and I'm gonna hit command g we're just gonna double quick and I'm gonna call this subject all right there we go so here are subject groups and we had a ton of great questions about masking and making sure your subject is mass out from the background really well and we are going to go ahead and do a really quick version of masking on both of these images so let's just use our marquee too and I'm just masking out the top and there we go basically just selecting these areas and then here on my leather mask I'm gonna hit command I invert those and we're going to do the same thing here so using bye marky tool and I could get the top part of this using this market it's just a kind of a simple way of making sure that at least the areas that got selected do not wind up showing up in my image okay and now we're going to do a very quick version of this so again this is it's the quick version we're going to go maurin depth once we decide on the image that way actually want but here we go let's go ahead and get through this so we could just see like the rough version so let's click on her image I'm going to go to select and then down here to cull arrange so really pretty much the same thing I was doing earlier in the day when trying to get my subject cut out from her background so we're going to click on our eyedropper tool and depending on where I click my goal was to get our green background really even from left to the right that's why we shot with those v flats but you can see even with that we're still going to see so little bit sorry we're going to see a little bit of variation if there was no variation I would just click here and it would be white everywhere but I can use this plus eyedropper to add anywhere I need teo so I'm just clicking a couple of these areas and now everywhere that's white is going to get selected so just really quickly able to click the plus a couple times there we go that I'll get selected were going click on the layer mask hit shift elite black is what we're going to fill it with because we don't want the green to be visible we're gonna hit okay and there we go she's cut out of her background again not perfectly but pretty well considering what we just did all right let's do the same thing here so we're gonna click on her layer again let's just zoom out I'm gonna go to select down here tio color range there we go and basically this color rain should be about the same let's bring our foes in this up a little bit this time hit okay okay and then here on her lame ass screen hit shift leader and we're gonna fill with black all right and I'll describe my lasso tool and get this out so you can see it is there a rough composite this is a super super quick way to get your subject onto a background so I'm gonna get command t we're going to scale this up a little bit and you could either scale this up or you can scale your background down either either way I find that I don't know if there'll probably be some people who say you know never scale any images up and you will lose a little bit of resolution but I find that it's fine I've printed my images a really large even with some scaling and they've always looked pretty good so yeah it's always worked well for me so let's get that one on there and then hit community because some of the time an image that you really like in light room just maybe work on your image like because we are doing depositing right so an image it works really well in light room might not really work that well in your final so that's something to keep in mind it's a good idea generally to bring in a few different command o will size your image correctly to fit your screen by the way it's generally a good idea to bring in a few different versions because something that might look great in light room by itself might not work out the same spirit photos so here's one of our versions and here's our different version which which one do we want to see this one all right school well I'm glad we did that because you guys could see at least it's a really quick it's a really quick composite and you can see that it's part of the process so I feel it's important to show you that that's what I usually do is I'll bring in a few different ones all right so we can go ahead and delete this one because we're not going to use it helping with scaling would you guys the in studio audience do you think she needs to be larger or smaller move left or right where where do we want a little smaller down into the left also seek and see some of that detail in the back those birds you just took so much time for them I don't know I know I e think I'm less attached to the bird's than you are wade I know that was like you know part of the part of the photo compositing we want to keep it in ok so it was something like that all right now cropping the image do we wanna like crop it in a little bit do you think just to make it a little bit more or do we want to keep it a little bit bigger like seeing the detail on that rock hard get the all right very cool now the other thing to think about is I generally don't like to flip my subjects around people tend to look really weird when you flip them backgrounds tend to look ok so if I wanted to let's just make a new layer underneath my subject and I'm gonna hit shift option command e this is going to make a stamp visible layer now if I wanted to hit command tea right click on the here and say flip horizontal is going to flip my background nowthe lighting changed on this one too so technically this is it shouldn't look right because our lighting change but if our lighting were even on the background keep in mind that you can still flip your background after the fact but I think I like it better the other way see how much actually that makes a big difference because we paid attention and try to match our lighting to this other one so you can see I think we actually did a really good job with that proud of us all right eh so what zoom in and take a look at our subject now we did the super quick version of cutting her out so we are going to see this fringing and stuff like that I know people are going to have a ton of questions about this which is great let's go ahead and take care I'm going to show you guys a few different ways you can actually take care of this and I'm gonna show you something that's gonna blow your minds here in are the fabric of our subject let's just zoom out so we can see the fabric this is it's semi transparent fabric and I chose this for the photo shoot because I wanted to show you some really amazing tools you can do even when you have semi transparent material just like this so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to figure out a way I've got to basically make that green disappear and I want to be able to see through the dress I want to be a boy to see the mountains through the dress right and I need a really advanced selection tool to do that and I'm gonna find that in my channels okay so we're going to go into our channels and we're going to use channels to make that really advanced selection now the first thing I want to do is I want to prep my image a little bit when I'm using channels it's such a good selection tool I actually don't want my original collection to get in the way so I'm gonna hold shift and click on this layer mask it's going to disable the layer mask temporarily okay I can always shift click and get it back so now that this is disabled we're going to go to their channels and we're gonna click through our red channel our green channel and our blue channel now it makes sense that the background will be relatively dark in the red channel it should be light in the green channel and it should be dark again in the blue channel because we photographed with a green backdrop so we can use the color range but we can also use this here in our channels to select out the green color in the backdrop okay so I'm gonna show you guys how this actually works let's just delete that guy okay so we're green channel what we're looking for is a difference between light and dark so we can see in this case the background is light and the dress is relatively dark on the background so I can use that difference to make a selection light areas will become selected dark areas don't get selected so what we're gonna do is I'm going to duplicate this channel clicking on the green channel and dragging it down here to the new channel icon now we're going to see green copy okay so with their green copy now we're goingto enhance that channel that light in the dark I wantto enhance that difference a little bit because anything lights going get selected dark's not going selected so again we're just going to use levels we've used levels ten times already today we're just gonna use levels again so command l is going to bring up our levels okay now if I choose I can choose a white point or you just click here on my whites and I can bring these a little bit lighter if I choose to do that and I could bring my midpoint to the right a little bit to make that a little bit darker all right so it doesn't make sense what I'm doing right now I want to enhance that different so the lighter areas they're going to become a selection all right and there we go we're gonna hit okay so the lighter areas again are the areas which we should be able to see through our fabric so to turn this into a selection all I have to do is hold on control or command and click on this layer and it turns the lighter areas into a selection that's gonna happen one hundred percent of the time if you're in channels and you hold controller command collect click on your layer it's going to make the lighter areas into a selection okay so now I have a selection of basically the greens in my image which in this case show through my fabric okay so all my lighter areas are selected you can see that on my image here so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna get controller command h real quick and all that it hides my selection it's still active like if I hit controller command h again my selections going to be visible ok it just hides your selection so you don't have to look at it it was like marching answer whatever okay now what we do does anyone have a guess on what we're gonna do brilliant yes we're going to choose our brush to also be for the brush you'll okay let's make our brush a little bit smaller and I just want to make my paint I'm gonna paint with black so the green is now selected and its selected so well that I could just paint with my brush tool and it's going to make the green disappear and the blue is going to stay so just grab my brush fool paint right over top of the green and there we go I'm able to see through the fabric and that amazing and it's also based on the transparency of the fabric all right so everyone was asking about feathers and hair but to me this is even mohr amazing than feathers and hair so this is one of the reasons I love shooting on green it's because you get these color casts but then you get to do really cool things with them now if there's a little bit color cast left here let's say there's a little bit of green left on my image it's not really a big deal all I have to do is I can grab a huge saturation adjustment layer okay and let's just go ahead and fill this all the way with white and I could just choose to change my hugh or I can click on this colorized button and I can make sure it's clipped to my layer there we go and I can color the green back to blue again so and I'll do this the color a couple of times just so you guys get it get a good hanging it but because this is now equipped to my layer right this is clipped to this adjustment layer I can color anything any bit of green that might be showing through my dress I'm now colored back to blue again is that amazing yeah so check that out we're able to see through her fabric to the mountain behind to me that's even cooler than the feathers in the hair and all that this up all right so we got there by shift clicking on our layer mask so if I hold alter or option and click on my lame ass check out what my lame ass looks like now that's an amazingly detailed later mask that's really really cool okay so we can basically do the same thing with her hair and her feathers and everything like that so let's go ahead and look at that we're going to go ahead and zoom in here and you can see the select color range it did a pretty good job but this isn't perfect right we can do better than that so what we're gonna do again I'm gonna hold down the show fifty because we're going to disable this layer mask again we want to disable the later asked so that's going to get us a good starting point toe work with because if I'm starting from this this is already kind of a little bit of a messy layer mask so we're going to shift click on this again and then we're gonna go through the same process again okay so let's go through our channels I'm gonna go to my green channel because I already know that this is going to be a good channel there's going to be a good difference between light and dark here so we're going to create another duplicate of my green channel now we're going to do the same thing command l will bring up our levels and I can choose my white point to be right over here all right so this time anything that's white is going to be one hundred percent selected anything that's darker than white is not going to be selected so I'm selecting out the backdrop here so let's go in here okay this area is white right and you can see the really nice fine detail we have here in the hair hold down controller command and click that's going to select out the light areas and in this case we want things to be invisible right light areas invisible so let's click on her layer and then just again we're going to go back to our later massacre that we had earlier and I'm going to choose my brush tool and we're just going to do the same thing I'm gonna paint with black that's a command h to hide that selection real quick pay with black and it's just going to clean up my selection including all the fine little details and the hare all right and if it takes away too much let's just zoom in so you can see we do get a lot of fine details but if it takes away too much now I want to paint some of the hair back in I just inverse my selection and then I paint with white on my lame ask does that make sense okay so let's give it a shot shift command I is gonna inverse my selection let's hide that selection again and I'm gonna paint with white on my layer mass now and look at that a perfect selection of hair tiny tiny strands of hair you can see through and the lightning in the background that's amazing chat rooms are blown away that's amazing they're blowing up blowing up now the same issue we had earlier was we still have that green tint but look at that layer mask that's just awesome so a little bit of the same issue we had earlier but again not a huge deal right because we have this huge saturation adjustment layer that took that green and change it to blue so we just paint that white here on this area and we can fix that or we can give this its own custom color so we can do that too let's create a new layer and this could be done on a per um per image basis pay with black or whatever color I'm sampling from my actual there we go change this down from normal to color so I can sample this color right here painted in and now I'm removing my green color cast simple is that how awesome was that yeah pretty cool alright let's do the same thing I'm going to show you guys again in case anyone is missing this because it's really really cool and that's great showing it again it's fantastic a big part of this is having that greenback there correct yeah because having that green like it takes something that could be negative and you're turning it into a positive you using it as a tool to make selections and well I'll show you another thing even if you got a great color like even if you're selection was perfect with this green color casts cause a lot of people are going to say you know the you know the color cast with the green and that's totally valid because sometimes that green color is going to get on the color of your model's skin or whatever like it's going to reflect onto your subject but it's super simple to target green's right so I can just go to a huge saturation layer I can target my greens let's just brought this up a little bit if I wanted to make my greens more saturated I couldn't do that so I've got greens I'm going to make them more saturated just like that or I could make them less saturated and they're not green anymore and that's it so if you want to remove a green color cast you just go over here too green and you take your saturation down to zero no green color cast or let's say your compositing someone into a background and the background has a blue color caste or the black one hundred orange color caste instead of taking your saturation down to zero why don't we just take our hugh over to the right a little bit and give it a slightly blue color cast and when we do that now they're going to have a blue color cast on which would actually happen if they were photographed in that scene that's cool alright I'm digging this stuff and I hope you guys are too let's go ahead and shift click on this layer mask one more time I'm going to go ahead and you can see I've got this huge saturation layer it turned those greens into blues which is really cool okay I've got my hugh saturation invisible now I'm going to go back to my channels were going to do the same thing I'm gonna make a selection over here and refined my layer mask so let's duplicate that green channel we're gonna hit commander control l to bring up our levels and I'm gonna bring my white point right about there and that's going to give me just this really nice selection so let's sit okay controller command click on that that's going to turn again the white areas into a selection we're going to go back to our layers and then here on our layer mask for this layer we're going to go ahead and paint black on her layer mask because this is where the greens were selected all right so that you can see before it was looking a little bit like kind of gnarly right now we just go in and we refine it and it's perfect a perfect here we go shift command I is going to invert the selection let's sit command h to hide it again and I can paint back every tiny little detail in all of the hair all this look at that who's gotten a layer mass with that much detail in it sorry that's I realized where that was going on maybe I shouldn't say that no I it's just a really cool technique that is you know it's one of those things were like if you know how to do it it's it's pretty easy and you can do it on any one of your images so you can get these amazing layer maths with super super fine definition and getting rid of that green color couse is also really really easy all right there we go that's amazing so I could spend a little bit of time doing this on the hair but we're going to switch to the orb and uh make sure that looks good as well