Lessons

Lesson Info

Soccer Shoot Studio Prep

it's a really simple slide but basically this is this is compositing on dh if you can nail these things you've got compositing down you really do what's going on in photoshopped you could learn in an afternoon you know doing a layer mask learning how to you know use your channels to get the green you learning how to use a selective color range you know to cut someone out of the background you could do that in an afternoon purchasing this creative live class you learn everything you need to know how to do that in photo shop and a huge step is doing it in photography that's what I want to teach you guys with this life all right so the first we've talked about this several times over over this workshop your lighting your perspective and your composition so I'm just going to go through that one more time and then we're going to kind of compare and contrast yesterday to what we're going to be doing today and through tomorrow as well so our lighting big one soft light versus hard light so so...

ft light is basically produced when the larger the apparent light source the softer the light is going to be so it doesn't necessarily have to be an extremely large light source like the sun is extremely large way bigger than the planet earth but it's also really really far away so it makes the what the parents light source actually pretty small like if the sun's only like you know that large in the sky and that's what lighting our subject and you know there is no clouds things like that you're gonna have hard shadows on the ground because the apparent light source is pretty soft now yesterday we brought this huge soft boxing and we're going to use this again today but this huge soft box if you guys remember was lighting rachel and that was you know three or four feet from her face so the light source was you know the apparent light source was this big which is much larger than the apparent light source of the sun right so that's producing soft shadows so the larger the apparent light source the softer your light is going to be the smaller the apparent light source the harder your light is going to be so I just kind of think about like on a bright sunny day when there are no clouds in the sky that's going to be a hard light you'll be able to like see the exact outline of your shadow okay I'm like a really cloudy day that's gonna be a soft light you won't you might not even be able to see your shadow it all and if you do it's going to be a really fun the edge so I always look at shadows when I'm determining light and when I'm analyzing photos like I want to replicate the light that's in a photo let's say I got an image by any leave woods that she's one of my paper photographer so I look at her images and I'm like I still have no idea how to do what she does by the way but I'll try to analyse like okay what what's going on with the light here I'll look at the shadows I'll look at some highlights I'll say is this a large light sources you know soft edges is a hard edge things like that so the lighting in getting that getting that right so a big party's gonna be matching whatever's going on in the background to your subject and yesterday we talked about that over and over again the light source in the background yesterday was it's a soft abroad light source so here in the studio he uses soft broad light sources as well okay now today we're going to go over hard of light source so that's why I chose these different images yesterday I chose the image of we did because it demonstrated one type of compositing one type of lighting and today we're going to be learning something totally different and that's gonna be learning hard lighting so our lighting in the background you can see we had those those four lights in the background the stadium lights in the soccer image and we're going to be replicating that in the studio today so if you guys want to look behind me we've got a green screen set up again so basically the screen hasn't changed but our lighting has changed quite a bit yesterday we were using too large the flats there were lighting the background and then we have a large soft box that was lightning subject but today we want to replicate basically what was going on with four bright light sources so when we're not using soft boxes today we're not using the flat soft boxes of the flats that's when you want to make broad soft lights today we're just using these guys well we've got some foil in here to keep the flare from entering camera but we're just using regular zoom reflectors on our on our image so we've got four these there's one to the left we've got two right above our our background here and then we've got one to the right so what this is going to do we've got four big light sources in the background and we've got four light sources here in the studio so we're matching the background to the studio not only that but if I'm coming from this side I'm coming from up there up there and down the other side I can pretty much make sure that if my subject is right here they're going to have a light that wraps around them all from this side all the way around the top of them all the way right down to the other side of them so I know that they're gonna have that rim light effect that light where there you know it looks like they're actually like glowing all the way around them I know that they're gonna have that because I've got light pretty much covering them from all these different angles so that's it's a lighting effect but the's air these air hard lights and we've got a bunch of individual hard lights than to fill in the shadows we've got our soft box right appears well so are soft box is going to be basically making we don't want the front of our subject to be completely black right we wanted to be ableto fill those shadows in so we've got our soft light source and that's going to be a filled light so it's going to be less powerful than these rim lights because it's just for filling in the shadows and then as a like a ticker or like our key light we're going to be bringing in a beauty dish when we actually photographed james and a beauty dish is it's somewhere in between the hard and soft light in my opinion it's more of a hard life because generally they're about twenty two inches the beauty dishes and that's going to be coming in right about this angle and make it's going to shine on his face just to give a little bit more separation with his space so that's our lighting design and again it's it's to match what was going on in her background right do we have any questions about the lighting designer anything like that were good up here cool all right so the next thing is the direction of the light which we pretty much covered the direction of light you want to match what's going on in the background and lighting direction is huge you know if you'd like someone from behind either like backlight or rim light it's going to be a completely different visual effect than lighting someone from in front or behind or even below I really wouldn't just lighting people from below reason being well everyone knows that it looks weird but I have a theory on why it looks weird my theory is that like evolution most of like human existence we see we're used to seeing people lit from the sun right which starts like here sidelight and it goes up to here top light and then it goes down to here sidelight and they don't see it again the sun never comes from from underneath so my theory is that humans just don't think that looks right because they're not used to seeing it so basically if it doesn't exist in nature don't do it in the studio that's my that's my theory well I guess we would never have four sons and made you're either but really looks cool uh okay so the direction of light plays a huge role in what your image actually looks like so our cameras photographing our subject this way we've got our lights that are going to be behind her subject now if we had our camera and it were to swing around the other way and all those four lights were lighting the front of our subjects it would be a completely different effect he would no longer be rimless he would just be very bright on the front of him so that's another thing to keep in mind okay the next thing we want to talk about is our color so yesterday we were matching some color in our background we wanted to create that like blue atmosphere to match kind of what was going on with the blue sky and that's why we jelled our main light blue and then we added that orb and we jelled that orange so we have those different bits of color that kind of like that they made the effect and help to match a subject with the background in this case today where we've got stadium lighting which is generally daylight balan anyway like the lights that are actually in the stadium like they're not they're not yellow right they're not usually yellow if anything they're slightly on the blues blue side but they usually daylight balanced so that's what we're doing here today we're basically matching the lighting color and strobes for the most part are daylight balanced anyway so they're no gels on any of the strokes today just another kind of one another thing to keep in mind and then our exposure the different lighting ratios are going to produce different effects so we've got our our rin lights are going to be a little bit brighter than the full light so there is going to it's going to be like a bright rib basically right around our subject all right the next thing we're going talk about is our perspective and again with the shot we've looked at our background image and it's just it's pretty much a shot from like a low angle and that's why we've got our camera at a low angle too so ah lot of this stuff is like common sense but if I don't cover it and it's like wow this isn't you know you didn't teach me this I don't know how to do that the's air the big things to keep in mind in the next his composition and composition in this case I mean in a couple different ways composition when it comes to a composite generally I'm speaking of the end composition I'm not speaking of like where you're actually photographing your subject here in the studio because generally as long as you've got them about on the right you know about like we're just going to cutting james out of background so it doesn't matter where he is in the studio the composition in terms of composite is going be like is he going to be innocent and she's going to be like floating in the air right in front of you know right in front of the image but if we wanted him like toe looked like he was standing on the ground we would have to do a lot mohr work we'd have to change things around like we would have to make sure that you know maybe the camera would have to be a little bit taller we'd have to work on creating a shadow so depending on where your subject is actually placed in your image you're going toe you're going to have to change what's going on in your studio to match that so if you guys remember the image from actually I could click way back to it because we're in keynote now okay so this is talking a little bit about composition in terms of a composite image this image is called the dark force and to get these people to actually like look like they're in the scene we've got basically what we did is we brought sand into the studio so today we're going to shooting on a crash pad because james is going to be jumping and we don't want him to get hurt but if you want somebody actually look like you're there in the scene my big suggestion would be place them on a surface that actually looks like the surface they're going to be in the composite so there's they're actually standing on sent these these people are not cut out from the background from like here all the way down to there that's actually just sand that we had in the studio and then in photo shop by color match the sand so it looked like the same color here which is really simple we just use clipping mass and then a levels adjustment layer to just add a little bit more red to the sand just like we learned how to do yesterday so they're actually just standing on sand but if this you know if these people were on asphalt if this were like an urban background what we would try to do is like bring in like a dark surface or something like that that would be about the same color as the asphalt um if you guys remember let's just go forward to the giant ego okay so this is our background if you guys remember from yesterday to a giant ego and our walls here they're made of wood so we made wood walls but our floor is this like it's got some gloss to it it's like a wood with some like like a lamb in it almost right so when we went to home depot what we did is we purchased these like laminate tiles that gave a similar reflective property so this reflective property it took care of things like you know the reflection of the hell here for you know the hell and what's going on in her dress so I wanted I mean look how similar that is like this to that because I went and I chose that material that would actually be similar to what it's going to be in the end so when I hit play here you can see the reflection here the reason that looks real is because it israel like it's it's the same I'm not trying to like make a reflection of the heel in photo shop it's actually from the laminate material I chose to use as a base so no matter what you're going to be compositing a person into the background if they are going to be standing on something just to make sure that you bring whatever you have in the studio it doesn't have to be perfect you can see like obviously it's a different material here I'm just using laminate tiles you know like one foot by one foot laminate tiles but they make sense when I when I put this on the reflective floor so if someone's going to be standing on a dark surface in and image bring a dark surface into your studio you know like laminate tiles you could goto lows or home depot you can purchase just about any building material you can think of pieces of wood you khun stain them paint them dark you know whatever it is bring those materials into your studio if they're going to be on a reflective surface so like let's say I wanted to play someone in an airport and I wanted their reflection to be visible what I would do is I would maybe put some lamb in it down maybe put a piece of like lex san or acrylic down on the floor as well so you captured that reflection you actually capture that in camera so you're not having to try to make it in photo job it's just it's going to look more real every time and it's going to be way easier on you same thing if they're standing on carpet just bring a little bit of carpet into the studio and when it comes to your composition and perspective if you can get about the same angle like in this case this is this is a relatively flat surface but when we go back to the dark force image way built little hills for them to stand on so they're not just standing you know kind of on a flat surface we built little hills and for that using things like apple boxes you get people to actually stand on them I've brought like bags of like quick creek concrete it's really like it's cheap to you so I've built like mounds and stuff like that out of that stuff and then just like poured sand or dirt or whatever over top of that so I'm just kind of trying to build that in the studio it's not expensive it usually doesn't take up a large area and it's going to make those composite seamless every single time so you don't have to think about how do I go and create the shadow or the reflection or make it look like they're actually on the surface and photo shop because that's the hardest area in a composite in my opinion is where the foot hits the floor like that if you can get that you're you're good to go so again if you guys are new to compositing don't even worry about it are confide that we're going to be doing today there's no foot on the floor are composite we did yesterday there's no foot on the floor so if you are new to composite give that a shot if those give those images such shot where you don't really need to worry about that you can put your gun put your subject just you know waste up in a frame