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Fantasy Composite Shoot Setup Part 2

segment is pretty much all shooting and we've got a ton of time in this segment because really like there's nothing so specific we have to get us we're doing a really cool shot with with an orb which way have I have no idea what this is actually gonna wind up looking like so we're just gonna testes during the photo shoot but this will be a good time for questions and things like that is you guys have those have those questions so over the break we just made like a couple of tiny adjustments to our lighting we added a blue gel onto this background light which we said we were going to do and I switched my port my camera from landscape mode which is shooting horizontal to portrait mode so we can capture more of our subject so rachel if you want to come on in we're just going to do another test shot basically keeping it just a zit is and each of the time we add a light so we gotta light looking pretty good with just like a general background light and then we added this added this room lig...

ht so now we're going to do basically just take another picture and make sure that looks good and in order to really make sure that it looks good and that it was a working we need to composite it back into original image but as you saw before that really doesn't take that much time when you get to like doing your final composite you wanted like really dial it in and make sure you you know male your layer masks and really take care of all the little details but when you're just doing a rough on set composite it could be relatively quick so that's what we're what we're going to do today right now and then we'll just do more alright so basically we're going to start this off I'm going to jump into all right we're here in light room all right take a test shot over the break and here we go looking good and it's gonna move my trip out a little bit all right and I'm gonna put my finger right in front of the frame there alright the other thing to kind of like keep in mind as I'm shooting this is I know that I'm actually going to be wined up I'm gonna add that orange a glow to this image so what we're going to be doing is we'll do this in just a little bit this is like I use like cheap silly props all the time and you can use lighting to make these things look fun like this is a candle holder that my girlfriend got me for like my birthday and it was like really really cool and it's supposed to like shine light from you know from the center of it I was like why don't we just shine like a orange light in here and have it like floating in her hand and this is kind of like castlight around the entire image and like again I'm a huge dork for color and it's complementary colors they're really simple to dio we were talking and I over the break we're like yeah the color wheel just like you know look on opposite sides of the color wheel and put both of those colors in your image and it'll look good like very very simple so that's kind of like the idea of state we gotta really intensely blue image so orange mixed with blue just it looks good every single time so that's kind of the idea so we are going to war end up adding this in I don't know if rachel's gonna be holding it or we might make it floating above there but we are going to add that orange color so I'm kind of thinking about that too like in this image I'm thinking okay you know her right side is a little bit darker than I would like you know like if we were to I really wanted to match the background image I would want a little bit more phil there so if we didn't have all these we've got we're here on creative life I've got a lot of cameras filming and we can't set up you know like huge reflectors because they would block everything but if we did have an issue where her right side is a little bit darker than we would like I would set up another v flat right over here and it would reflect the light and fill that in but because we're adding an orange light right every year I really don't need to worry about it so just kind of some things if you got some people at home had questions like it's a bit dark on that side I know that and we're going toe we're gonna add this like to all right well let's make sure that looks decent in our composite so I'm just going toe pull this image into photo shop all right and whatever your guys workflow works for you go with that I'm just happened to pull these in from from finder and you know doing it this way during a photo shoot you know it's uh whatever method happens they're just work for you at the time all right so we're bringing this inn and I'm just going to use my move tools to click and drag this image right into our background here all right let's sit effortful screen and then with my marquee tool again just the same way I was doing before I'm gonna make some selections here all right and I later mask I'm gonna fill those areas with black so this is going to take care of the majority of the background there there we go all right and then we're going to just go to select same exact thing we did last time let's make sure we're on our layer this time so click on your layer will go to select down here to color range now because we already chose the green from earlier it should be the exact same so actually I shouldn't have to change any of the settings because color range will remember the last thing you did so it's going to turn that into a selection we just click on her layer mass now and I'm gonna hit shift elite and hit okay and fill that with black all right so you can see really really quick basically how that how that worked out all right now if I didn't move this image around you can see well we will be bringing in some more green so I could definitely I could definitely mass that away really quickly if I needed to all right let's just bring a huge saturation layer I'm gonna clip that so it only effects the layer that rachel's on all right and now we're going to kind of compare these so let's just zoom in and see a little bit what we've got going on with our with our light source here you so you can kind of see the light zoom in a little bit more cnc and there is green fringing but again when we get into segment three of this I'm going to show you how to take away that green it's really simple and you can do it really quickly but right now I want to make sure that I'm looking at at the light so that little bit of light let's just compare this version with our original version in which there was no light coming from the background there was only like coming from it's just that there was only light coming from the front and you can see it it does look a little bit mohr one dimensional and now that we have that like kind of coming in from the background it looks as though can you see that that's cool right like it looks like this light here is actually shining light here on her hair as well and it's hitting you know even here on her shoulder and it's going to show up here in the feathers as well so these little things you know you can kind of tweak these as a photoshoot goes along and make sure that you know everything kind of works together at this time I would usually work on placing our image as well and I know I went through a lot of a lot of steps to make this really really cool background and then we're covering up most of it that's totally fine I knew that was gonna happen anyway we might even you know it doesn't matter at this point but if we did want to you know later on down the line I'm just doing a very very quick blur here but if we did want to like blur the background and make it look like it's more focused on our subject we could do that stuff after the fact to so we do have a really cool backgrounds in my opinion it's totally okay that we cover up most of it it's better toe you know it's better to have it than to not have it all right there we go or we can leave it there and focus I'm gonna click on this layer and then just hold downshift and click on the layer mask and there were what I'm doing here is testing about the location of the light versus the location of the light source in my background so we've got this light bitter clouds there and that again was totally created in photo shop you can see like these mountains were just added to the image this lightning was added to the image you know everything that's going on in the background was just added so if I decide later on that I don't want this stuff here or I want to flip it around like if you know I've got to say I think this is our lightning layer if if it just turns out that I wanted to move my lightning I could I could do that too and now I've got lightning over there you know this is the cool part of our compositing is I've got most of the work done for me before I get in the photo shoot but I can still a just all this stuff I could put totally different clouds in their different rocks that whatever the stuff is even after the photo shoot is done so yeah in my opinion that that lighting looks it looks really good from coming from that side again it's a little bit dark on this side we could either you know feel that in in photoshopped or we're going to fill that in manually with color here in the studio so we're gonna get to that is there any questions while I absolutely so first off erin I wanted let folks know that we are going to be a doing a dedicated green screen q and a tomorrow so you can look forward to that but I think I want to start off with why did you choose to use gels for the lights instead of doing sort of custom white balances and you how do you deal with white balances that's a great question okay so let's say we weren't adding this orange let's just say that all we wanted to do was give the entire image of bluish tint that is something you could do with white balance like you could custom white balance in your camera or you could shoot in raw and adjust your white balance after the fact but because I'm I'm now going to mix some different colors right I've got the blue kind of like filling in the background but now I'm gonna pop this orange in here and I want that orders to say orange let's say in the original images by was shooting you know a little bit on the warmer side and I had to really cool that down to match the blues in in the image to what's going on the background that would change this color as well so matching winchell's is that's kind of what therefore right it's a lot of people use gels in a creative manner which is great but I think it's important to remember that for the most part gels were created to match color temperature like that's in cinema that's like that's why they actually were created you know it's it's fun to use them for creative reasons but I think matching is important too and you got a couple different codes that are going to get you most of the way if your light's a little on the warmer side use the color temperature orange or ceo joo and that's gonna warm your light up if it's on the cooler side see tv or cold temperature blue it's going to cool you down and ninety percent of what you need to do orange or blue light you'll be fine because that's how it exists in nature the sky's never going to produce like a glowing you know green light unless you're under the northern lights or something like that but in most cases it's going like either go to the warm side of the oranges and reds and things like that or the cool side with like the blues and maybe the purples if it's a sunset but in that case they sell purple jealous too so you can just pop those in there as well cool and that was from chris san diego want to give a shoutout he's been asking or she some great questions and here's one from jasper how do you ever do you ever fit in natural light aaron in your work and how do you how do you best control that ok good question natural light is when you're doing composite in natural light I find it's I don't mess around with the studio pretty much at all like if I if I have a natural light images my background which is you know just in my opinion I don't know unless it's a really nice natural light I get really bored like midday sunlight like that's you could do on amazing job compositing things into an image that's got midday sunlight and in my opinion most of the time it's still gonna be boring that's just kind of like what drives me seeing my images you know like I like playing with colors of light and that's one of the things that's fun with me for me but if you are trying to match like a midday sun light and you want to shoot that in a positive just shoot it on the midday sunday don't like don't go in the studio you know just go outside and matched the lighting that's that's going to be the easiest way to actually matched the lighting from just like you know a totally normal day in this case actually that's a really great question if we weren't in the studio now today right now and I wanted to kind of match this light I would think about going outside it like you know seven or eight pm during dusk when the light's going to be you know like a little bit you know and adjust my color temperature of my camera and see if I could get were like a dark stormy day like go outside during a dark stormy day and try to photograph your subject like that so you can you can do this stuff outside it's just in the studio can be a little bit more predictable and you know you could do it any time of day all right cool so I don't know what this is gonna look like at all it's on it works like snot on it all right get pretty hot yeah we don't want to melt the jealous that's a great that's a great little learning point if you are using gels which I love to use them and they're super cheap keeping modeling lights off because they can melt your jewels rachel so if you want to stay here and just kind of like hold your hand up like this we'll keep the orb out out of it for now alright maybe like a upward in that direction cool and then get a little close so we're shooting again with the portrait style image today so we don't have a ton of horizontal room right so she can't she can't really be like out here like this it's got to be a little bit closer we're just going to see what this looks like it might you know turn out great on the first shot chances are we're gonna have to do some adjustments all right all right there we go it looks pretty good but we need to make our orange we needed um make it a bit brighter and we need to bring up our intensity as well it is yeah so I am going to move this back a little bit a cz well and this is thiss adapter here is called a snoot and it basically just focuses light into a beam and I think this will give what we want but it might not so if it doesn't it's not a big deal we'll just improvise right here on set which I didn't tell anyone else about so it will be true in from the improvisation alright yep if you want to go for it and we'll see how this looks oftentimes you know if you need to make you like a little bit brighter you can up the up the power of your life and if you need to make your bright light more saturated like more of an orange color than you can add more chelsea so let's just zoom in and kind of like analyze this and talk about what we've got all right so zooming into her hand it's not completely blown out but it it is a little bit brighter than what we would like I want to kind of like a deep orange color not only that but the light is shining in her hand but it's not it's not really hitting rachel's face at all so that's basically says that this lighting accessories it still might work let's go ahead and bring in that orb thing it still might work but there's a chance that this might not work and this is just this is what happens during a photo shoot because um let's see what happens when we shot it through through here so if you want to kind of hold this up like that very cool in again in photoshopped this should look a lot cooler than what it does like it's okay if you're if things don't look that cool onset all right because we can make things look much cooler in in photo shop when they're done all right so we do have a little bit of a warmer color but again it's focused there and my original idea I kind of wanted it to shine on her face is well like I wanted to make sure that that light winds up in your face so let's do that I think we're going to ditch the snoot which is really fun so we're gonna have to figure out something else teo put on here besides the snoot we do you still want to gel this and good thing we've got time all right and this is the sort of thing that happens all the time doing a photo shoot all right so we're gonna ditch the suit john will take care of it uh yeah do we have any questions maybe put some orange inside that uh like lined it on the inside of it may be that color would be more intent we could do that yet I kind of want to stick with keeping the gels on light for now but I think that would work too I think that bigger issue that I see with this is that it's not hitting her face it all you know it's like it's in her hand but it's really nowhere else just let's see what this looks like here maybe we'll get some tape yeah and then if we could get another cut or two of ctu so these jobs come in like different the cuts were different strength so you have like a quarter and a half and a full and things like that you can always check these together again and that's what's going to make this a little bit more saturated so I want a bit more saturated color so if we could we can just get more of these um that's good oh can can I give you guys a really quick aside like my door kary I'll tell you something I do to dork out sometimes if I'm watching a movie and I see that it's not color corrected properly or like if they're if they're doing composites and there the color is off from like one part of the other I'll actually take gels and I'll put him on my tv in our color correct on my tv and that's kind of like how I learned a bit of color correction because you khun I mean you can change the color that you see from you know what's on your tv so I think I'm probably the only person in the history the world to do that I thought you were going to say you put on the three d glasses but your own modified three two glasses with different that would be even cooler right that would be even cooler that's next level I'm I'm not there yet all right let's try this let's see how this works all right that's cool yeah look and we can already see the light on rachel's face so this might just be awesome all right let's give this a shot and I'm gonna use the old finger methods block that light there all right cool so we can see I can see it before you can because I get them back on the screen but we can see this is a lot more of what we actually want right we've got our lights hitting our subjects and giving this like nice glow but it's a little it's a little bit too intense right generally the mohr intense your light is you tend to lose color so if you need to add more saturation this got me for a long time when I was using gels I was like why is it looks white and its most of times clear light's too bright it's over exposed so if we want to just bring the power down in that just a little bit and then we could probably bring the height down on that just a little bit as well and see how this looks so kind of my inspiration or my thought behind the shoot was like I don't know I really like fantasy stuff so I was thinking she kind of like a witch doctor who lived in the mountains he was like someone in a spell this like glowing orb so that's what we're doing all right yeah let's give it another shot so in this oh yeah that looks really really cool if you want to put the world kind of like right up to the light there let's see let's just kind of flipped through these all right so there's our first and then our second witches yeah I think we're a little bit too bright still with that like um kind of just another tip when it comes to doing this type of shoot and working with your models I get a lot of questions about working with models and I'm some people are naturally like soup rice is amazing like she compos models and make them look amazing like just like it seems like almost effort lee effortlessly and I've never really had that skill so I have like a little bit of a crutch a little bit of fall back that I choose to use with my models and what I usually have them do is I find that if people are just kind of like standing around it's really hard to make people look interesting and good just most of the time they look boring or they don't know what to do so giving a model or your subject a prop just something to interact with I find makes a huge huge difference in the overall end the image you know and you probably are experiencing that right now right yeah it's like ok yeah it's like you can interact with this thing or like you know this is like a glowing you know and right now we're still doing our lighting test but when we get going I might say like okay pretend it's really hot or something like that or you know whatever it is and I find that that's a lot easier for your subject to kind of like toe work with something rather than just like staring and be like okay you know what take good pictures so anyway just and you'll notice that in my images like pretty much every time I'm shooting a shooting someone they're they're interacting with another person or an object and if it's an inanimate object like if it's a composite and there's not an actual object on set there usually I'll put it a person or like a prop there or something that there they can interact with and then over place that afterwards so I hope that helps out just something I thought about now right yeah let's give it another shot you can move it just a little bit this way we go all right these are looking great so I can take this amount of orange that's actually in this photos now and I can totally bring that up a little bit more as far as like brightness in in photo chopper light room and I could take that amount of orange and make it even more intense let's do can we get another cut of the cdo I think jon's doing it already which is awesome the other idea I kind of wanted this orb um it's a little bit too large right now in my opinion I kind of wanted a little bit smaller and I wanted it to be floating in space so we're probably gonna photograph this separately and this is yet another type of compositing so this end image is going to be like ten different types of compositing all kind of like bundled up into one you know we're gonna be building our background they were going to compositing our subject onto the background we're gonna be putting this in and we're gonna be doing some really cool special effects there so let's try but if you just want oh well after john puts the orange other if you want to just hold this and then to composite this in like that you probably just have someone hold it like that like pretty pretty simple really all right we'll probably have two minutes is there a question no one has won perfect let's do well john's doing his magic over there so let's see here I want to find some good ones that we have that air on topic when do you ever use a third party tool there's a tool called a passport color chucker can you talk about that and how you actually mark your white balance in your color balance make sure it's perfect once you get it back to the computer yeah great question I do we use exactly one of those passport color checkers way also do learn we do video tutorials on photo shop and but most of what I do nowadays is photoshopped tutorials so for video we definitely we use one of those colored checkers in every single one of our episodes so we can color correct in you know in a premiere or whatever it is after the fact so I find there really really helpful for video they're hopeful for photo as well if you're going for some like realistic skin tones and things like that like this image is you know we've already got blues and orange and things like that coming in and I generally don't use them as much when I'm doing this sort of thing because if I were to bring in you know a fifty percent great card here and then after the fact I were to match the white balance of that fifty percent grade it would correct it would correct it in the wrong way right because the fifty percent gray would show up a lot more blue because we'd actually have blue light showing up on it so what we try to warm up my image to compensate for that but we actually don't want that in this case so when I'm shooting with strobes in the studio generally try to minimize the amount of light that's in my studio external lights so most of the time I want the light that's hitting my subject to just be strobe light and if you're using strobes that you know have a decent color consistency which most nowadays do I usually shoot in fifty six hundred degrees kelvin on my camera so that's basically it's daylight balance which is what most drugs air you know outputting anyway and then that most of the time that's going to keep my white balance pretty much on point fantastic and we also have folks asking about how you handle noise issues do you ever like find your background is potentially noisier than your model and how do you handle those issues okay cool well with the composite you can always add noise that's something that I'll have to do a lot of time noise is a big one and also like sharpness is a big one because oftentimes you're going to be working with backgrounds or stock images that are not going to be as sharp like these images are super sharp right I'm shooting it like f f nine isil one hundred and one over one sixty the second using strobes in the studio these images going to tack sharp and there's not going to be a lot of noise but if I need to put those into an image that maybe isn't tack sharp and has some noise you can always add that little bit of a blur and a little bit of noise after the fact that I do that all the time that actually later today I'm I am gonna be adding more blurred to some of the stock images to get them to look good together so great I don't have that stuff good answer thank you yeah trading the heat so much I wasn't I was worried about the gold all right yeah yeah well you know if it melts we got more and the folks at home won't smell it so it's okay all right uh yeah if you want to basically do the same thing yep no yep this I'm just gonna be your hands this could be your hand and then we'll show people how to actually if you want to do instead of like out like this maybe come in like this and then we want to make sure the camera khun see like the inside of your hand a little bit more yeah there we go perfect this is gonna be floating so you don't have to yeah okay actually and that's a really great question let's have me looked like right here I'm going to make it float like right about there okay photo shop that's the fun part about compositing too is like it's a lot of pretend you go pretend there's a thing floating in your hand there all right it's looks good let's bring down the intensity of that light chests a little bit more all the way okay we can bring it up in height maybe yeah maybe bring your hand up a little bit more like this you want to change yeah there we go bring your hand a little higher all right really nice and easy leg room seems to be like lightening it up just a little bit so I'm going to just hit the d for development module here in light room um it's probably some import settings or something like that I would see about bringing this down just a little bit darker and this is another good point to make his well during a photo shoot if you find that one area of your image is a little bit overexposed in one area is a little bit underexposed you can combine those together in photo shop really easy later so as long as you still have your full you know dynamic range of colors I mean I always prefer to get it as right as possible in camera but if I do need a you know darken this sound a little bit in leg room I can definitely do that and if it's all of my life that can come a little bit darker then I'm probably just going to bring my aperture I'm going close that down just a little bit so in this case I jumped o f ten and here we go let's see what that looks like all right so you guys can see like you know we are doing composite but still like a ton of what's going to go into this composite is actually on its onset it's during during the actual photo shoot all right so I changed my camera o f ten which is three guys who were using strobes strobes versus ambient light the big question we get a lot of time and being light is controlled well it's going to be with aperture and shutter speed but if you are using if you're using strobes your shutter speed doesn't affect the light that comes in your camera nearly as much is your aperture does because the light that comes out of these strobes is usually during a like a very short burst so if your shutter speed is you know one over two hundred of a second versus one over to you know half a second the life that's coming from the strobes is it only exists for a very short period time thinking like a strobe light like in a nightclub like if you as long as you catch that small burst of light you're okay so closing down your aperture means that less light is going to enter your camera no matter what the time is that makes sense really waited explanation but if you want less light from your strobes just closed down your aperture a little bit so make that number go higher and you're good to go