Lessons

Lesson Info

Compositing Soccer Stadium Lights

we're rolling right alone this is looking great we brought in a sky we've brought in a stadium we've got some stadium lights we've got our raft in and everything's looking actually pretty good in black and white we haven't had to make a ton of adjustments to actually make this work I think our sky could be a little bit darker and things like that but so far I think we're actually looking really good so the next thing I want to do we're going to go and add a little bit more definition to our lights in the background so to do that I'm going to show you guys a really cool technique actually we're going to create a custom brush to create some definition with our light so the custom brush we're going to use is basically going to be I'm created out of a lens flare so I've got some stark images here and we're going to find one right down here we have one basically of a lens flare here we go all right so let's hit open command o open that okay now an image like this is super simple to actually...

apply on to your photo if you wanted to just this one time and do this regularly just use your move toe click and drag from one image to another after full screen and now we're going to use a blending mode basically we're just going to use a blending well that's going to make your blacks just disappear that's just it command tt scale this down a little bit so if you were only doing this one time if you only had one of these players a really good way to do this would just be the change of lending mode from normal down here to screen and that's going to get rid of your dark so let's just make our dark a little bit darker just to make sure they go away completely there we go and there we've got a lighting effect that we can add on really anywhere you want on your image quick tip when you're using these be sure to make them visible over top of light areas so they're going to make sense over top of the light you know here in the sky if you wanted to make it look like it was a son you know here a sign or something like that but over here on something dark doesn't really make sense so make sure you put it on something that's already in me like now this totally works but I actually want to make this lighting effect I want to duplicate this like many many different times overtop of each one of these lights and because I want to do that I'm going to create a custom brush that's going to allow me to do this really really quickly so we're gonna show us how to do that back to this document here we're going to go down to from image and then down to image eyes were going to change this size because right now it's huge it's nine thousand by six thousand pixels which is really really large so are with you let's just make this about six hundred pixels that's more than big enough to make a custom brush okay now when you're using a custom brush in photo shop which you basically want to do is create a white background and then black where everyone your brushed to show up and right now we've got the opposite so I'm gonna hit command I on this layer so we've got a white background and now close to black but we've still got some color and they're basically where our brushes actually gonna show up so we're going to do a couple more adjustments on this before we turn it into a brush all right first thing I want to do is hit shift man you that's going to de saturate this we don't need any color we're just creating a brush next we're gonna hit mandel and I'm gonna bring up our white point with this so we're gonna take our whites and I'm just going to bring it out just a little bit all right so basically what we've got here is this shape that's going to show up in it as a brush now whenever you're painting in photoshopped you have regular brushing most brush apes are just like a a standard around soft round or hard ground crushed but you can change that shape really anything you want on dh that's what we're about to do so we're you know image sorry edit and then down to define brush preset all right and let's just call this flair and hit enter okay so now we have our brush reset let's go back to this document I'm gonna hit f for full screen on this let's create a new layer and then use my brush will also be for the brush will now to get your flair brush just right click and you'll get your little brush menu here let's just go ahead and see what we've got and if you all the way down to the very end your last brush should be the exact brush that you just made so here's our flare brush now you can continue to add all kinds of really cool special effects of these brushes or you can just click yeah and then you've got flair every time you click you've got a little bit of flair you just click and dragging you get something like that if you want to do something like that so there are a lot of really cool things you can do let's just zoom in now this claire we're actually gonna make it look like it's coming from the lights so if you did want to like add some variation you can totally do that like if you wanted to add some like angle jitter to this then this would mean everytime it would make a new piece of flair it would rotate it around so we would add a little bit of variation to that which is totally possible you could scatter this around you could turn your size jeter up so where you could say if you wanted to make fairy dust or something like that you just painted around like that and you would make you know like crazy crazy flair but for right now really we're just going to just choose something really really simple all right let's go ahead and d select and now we can just go ahead and add this to our lights so let's go ahead and I want to keep everything really nice and grouped drooped well so here in our left lights we've got this light here we're just going to zoom in and kind of decide the amount of flair all right and basically it's my job to just do this a few times so I can answer some questions while I do this keep in mind that we actually did create this way created these basically different lights from the same light source so I could have done this in the beginning if I wanted to and kept from having to do this over and over for each of them but this will give me some time to answer some questions all right yeah just go are you goingto change perspective after do you want to do any of this like and make sure you have all of that set now or does it matter to you because you know you can always choose that group and change the perspective of that or is it how you want it yeah if I if I do want to change perspective I can totally do that at any point in time I could do that now where I can do that towards the end of my image I know that it's pretty probable that wind up moving these lights once we get everything together pretty much everything we see on this image is going to wind up moving I don't see this image staying as is because we're going to get our soccer player in and we want to make sure that we're doing our best chopped actually feature of the soccer player so with that I want to make sure that you know nothing is kind of getting in the way and the lights are showing up in the right place and actually highlighting him exactly how we want to so all this sort of stuff is probably gonna wind up moving spencer just like a rough sketch and then once you get your people in there you kind of you wait to make it yeah pretty much yeah just like exactly what you said just pretty much a rough sketch at this point you know it's be nice if everything was like you know finalized where we actually wanted to you know live in the very end but chances are I'm gonna wind up moving these things around and you could see in the brush there there's these little areas right over here that's just when we created the brush apparently there was something in the bottom right hand side of the screen that I didn't see so I'm just erasing those out but that's that's not a standard brush technique that's just a little artifact that remains so custom russia's air really really cool you khun basically create any shape you can think of and then use thes I've used custom brushes to create for on some of my image with where I need to make some you know furry creatures and things like that I'm cutting something out of its background that does require some for and then I need to you know replace that in or use for brush to create my lame ass that's another really good technique as well wondering if there's a reason you would do this after you've placed the separate ones out or you would do it before and then duplicate because it kind of creates a little bit more randomness that you're doing it separately but is there a reason to do it before or after um not really yes the randomness that's why when you said all right so yeah just doing that you can see it didn't take too long but it it took these lights they were pretty boring before and it just really made them a lot more interesting so we're actually gonna be doing a lot more to these lights too really add more and more flair exits there's such a big part of the image we want we want to really do feature these lights but at this point they're they're just we're going to kind of build this over and over again I don't want to spend like an hour just on the lights you know that's going to get boring so and that's generally how I work I'd like to jump around with my images like I'll do something like that and then it's like okay I don't want to mess with these lights anymore now it looks like I kind of want to mess with the sky so I'm gonna I'm gonna mess with the sky a little bit just kind of looking around and seeing you know what on your image you'd like to fix and that's why you know doing these doing these sketches even from early on at any point in time if you want to look at these images and just you know kind of take a step back and say like okay what needs to be fixed about this like we've got some pretty dark you know the dark darks here in our stadium and we want our background to be pretty dark I want the background be dark with some really bright lights that high contrast because that's kind of the style that we're going for with this image so this area being so dark up here usually whenever you're seeing like really dark objects in an image there going to be also mirrored in the scott your sky is going to be really dark that's well all right so I know just looking at this I can I've been lighting up my stadium or I can darken up my sky and what's going on here in our grass so I think we're because of the style of this I think we're going to take what's here in our sky we're going dark in this down and we're gonna darken down what's on our grass as well so we're gonna go ahead and start with that again I'm just kind of like I'll do this all the time just look around them and be like oh yeah this needs to be changed issues to be changed so before jumping into something oh do like basically a rough sketch over top of my image all right so here in our background now I can feel free if I wanted war my background I can do this too so if I hit command t I khun warp warp this around or let's just see committee this's huge right now for some reason when I created the background this extended all way over here when I when I cropped out so if I want to just kind of like eliminate all that extra that I don't really need I'm just going to get my marquee tool and select what's actually inside of my image and I'm hit command c copy and then command the pace and now if I I want to I'm only dealing with background that's visible there so I'm not trying to you know transform something that's huge so if you guys ever deal with something that's you know you're trying to transform something that is a point way outside your document just select everything copy and paste and you're good to go all right so now if I wanted to like you know make my sky a little bit more dramatic I could just kind of bring this up a little bit might be a little less realistic but a little more drama never hurt especially with these sports type am unjust okay we're going to make an adjustment later I'm gonna go up to our levels option command g is gonna clip that and I'm just going to make the mid tones just a little bit darker and you're going to see how about that starts to fit with what's going on in the stadium a little bit better right it's giving us mohr that contrast that we really want all right let's see what's going on here in our grass for basically getting doing a similar idea we're going to grab a levels adjustment layer and I'm gonna grab my midpoint and kind of dark in this down there we go that's it command I and then we're going to use a grady into also g for the greatest tool I'm going to choose a foreground too transparent radiant and then I'm gonna paint from white to transparent so basically just painting this down like this horn and I'm darkening down that area the field and then I think I'm gonna light in the foreground as well just a little bit so we're going to grab a level adjustment layer it's time to go this way command I to inverse that later mask and then lighting that so I just kind of it was dark here and light there now I just flip that around so just to make it kind of fit with what's going on in argument just a little better okay and now our stadium there we go let's just create a level adjustment layer here optioned manji this lower end of the stadium I want this to be a little bit darker there so we're just going to take this white point bring it down a little bit hit command I on that and then now I'm just gonna use my razor brush fool just paint white and that's clip to my stadium but that's just gonna make sure this bottom layer there we go lends it a little bit better yeah hey this way on the drive in this morning I was looking kind of like the landscape and trying to be like oh I see that haze over there the things that are farther and just kind of trying to think about how I would see those in real life and you just don't really think about that before you do those things it's not really like super apparent that I would think about doing that now so just paying attention to things more around me now because of what you've been teaching and I really love it yeah it's um they're all kind of stories from my personal life where like I'll just I'll just sit somewhere and like stare at a light by friends around me over like what are you doing and I'm just like you would not understand like it all comes like analyzing how something is reflected around a current like super interesting and like no one around me is ever going to find that interesting but even here as we're looking like I'm looking into some of the lights that are that are lighting me right now we've got some kino flows in the studio that are lighting me like I can see a glow around those lights like with my own eyes and the camera sees those clothes as well so when you're doing stuff like this in photo shopped like if you if you don't duplicate those kind of like those glows there's like atmospherics and things like that they don't look really so you know just being like this is my world and I really really love it so I'm just I'm always just kind of staring at things and I'm like I'll cover up one eyed blur my eyes and like I'm just looking around me a lot of time so most of what I do in photos is just that it's just a reflection of what I'm like kind of observing in my own life so it's really cool that you're starting to see that too because that just kind of observing things in real life is going to help you create those things in photo job cool observation but you're right I mean there's like three or four changes that I just made let's see you don't know I'm going to I'm going teo I'm gonna create a new layer up here and we're going to call this a stamp visible layer basically this is gonna be our I'm just going to show you guys really quickly the difference is that I made with our just these couple of levels adjustment layers all right cool so just before this conversation I made a levels adjustment let layer we darken this stadium down we darken the light sound and we change the lights here in our grass so that's like that was before I did and that's just four levels adjustment layers that took me two seconds so this is before and that's the after and like that looks really that's also look really that looks for you that doesn't look real and it's not perfect yet but you can see it's just like I've got all those pieces together when it comes to my composition in my perspective and things like that now it's about matching lighting I can still see the grass in the background needs to get a little bit darker so that's what I'm about to do all right let's go ahead and delete those I'm going to turn all these layers back on all right and we'll be good to go so like this background grass here for instance let's just push this a little bit further to the right there we go that'll help match it a little bit better alright cool is any questions yeah I was actually wondering if you ever change your adjustment layers to just luminosity so they don't affect color when you're going later on took effect to change all your color good question um yeah sometimes that could be really helpful I think about a year ago I was doing that more often but I find that even if you just change it to luminosity I still usually need adjust color or color balance after the fact anyway and nowadays I feel more comfortable with my color adjustments in photo shop and again like using levels assessment layers and I think everyone learned on day one how we were able to adjust colors with just levels adjustment layers and so no matter what I'm doing with light and dark and things like that I'm always color correcting afterwards anyway because it's it's really interesting like how light and shadows work often times you know shadows or not often grayscale shadows will often have like blues in them and yellows and things like that and if you if you're just copying a shadow in and you know making it lighter darker but you never add that blue or that yellow in they won't look right so that's another thing like kind of observing things in real life but a quick tip is if you have a warm light source like a red or orange light source the shadow color will usually be a complimentary color so the shadow color will be cool if you have a cool light source the shadow color will usually be warm which is kind of interesting question from the internet from buddha why do you prefer levels adjustment over curves or can you talk a little bit about when you might use one or the other a sure thing I'm using levels adjustments during these three days mostly so I can just keep a consistent language I'm using levels pretty much all the time just so you guys can see me using the same dialogue over and over and over again and you can see that everything I'm doing can be done with levels I could have just chosen curves and chosen to only use curves during these three days and got in the same results so kirsten level they're very very similar and curves will give you a little bit mohr will give you a little bit more options when it comes to like you I'll just give a quick for instance when we just make a curve adjustment layer if in a curve I need to make this black point a little bit lighter and then come here and make that darker and then make this lighter and then make that darker this is something you can't really do with levels in the same way but the amount of time that I'm actually doing this with curves is very very rare most of the time when I'm using curves it's grab this and pull it down grab that and pull it up and that is exactly the same thing is using a levels and pushing this in or pulling that out it's it's just the same so it's it's a preference and for this workshop I'm not switching back and forth between curves and levels a lot because I want to keep the same language so you guys hopefully make it easier to learn all right cool question all right so this is this is pretty good guys there's again still in black and white but this is it's getting really close to what I actually want for our subject