Add Cloud Background Video
I started getting requests for a video version of adding the cloud texture. So I took yet another photo of Sierra and applied the cloud texture.
The final image:
The final image.
Step by Step Adding a cloud as a background texture
This is a step by step instruction on how to perform a similar look as the photo I enhanced a couple days ago. First start out with your model photo. Clean up the background or any blemishes on the model you may want to remove.
In this case the original background color is very important since that’ll be the base color the clouds will take. Overlay the clouds and change the blend mode. In this case I used Linear Light to achieve the rich coloring.
Now we want to bring the model back to the front. So make a selection of the model and make a new layer with a mask. Actually we’ll need two of these. Your selection doesn’t have to be perfect. Since all we are doing is blending with the original image, if anything is out of place it’ll be difficult to find any errors.
The top most copy will need a little fiddling, but we’ll worry about that in a moment. This is just the cutout of the model on top of the blended background.
Most people would stop there but it lacks some punch so the next thing to do is to make the top most copy of the model black and white. In this case I’m going to use the top copy to enhance the lower copy. So I don’t want the black and white to be really strong. Just enough to heighten the shadows.
Now we change the blend mode between the two copies of the model. I used Hard light in this case to give her a more bronzed look. This will better match the background.
Finally you just turn all the layers on and adjust opacity as you see fit to balance things out. To the side is all the layers I used and what I set their blend modes to if it wasn’t normal. You can easily bring through some of the cloud texture on the model by adjusting the opacity, but in this case I didn’t like the effect.
The Photography Tip of the Week #066
No Rush Hour
066 Photography Tip of the Week (audio)
One of the golden rules of outdoor photography is related to what photographers call the golden light. There is an hour around sunrise and sunset when the sun produces “golden” light. This gives you a rather unique quality to the light that cannot be reproduced any other time of the day. It starts about 20 minutes before sunrise and lasts about 40 minutes afterwords. For sunset it starts about 40 minutes before sunset and lasts about 20 minutes afterwords. There are some subtle differences between sunrise and sunset, but for all practical purposes the light and benefits of outdoor photography between these times of day are the same. Here are a few added benefits of the golden hours of the day.
1) Softer light – The angle of the sun is low on the horizon. The light has to travel through more atmosphere due to the curvature of the Earth. This spreads the light out more than when the sun is high in the sky. This diffuses the light over a wider area and creates soft light and smooth shadows.
2) Longer deeper shadows – The angle of the sun is so low that the shadows are very long. This also has the added benefit of creating deeper shadows. Because of this I often will even shoot exposure bracketed images just in case I need to make an HDR image.
3) Color shift – Since the light of the sun is going through a steeper curve of the atmosphere there is a prismatic effect that changes the wave length of the light, shifting the colors. Depending on the altitude and the composition of the atmosphere (any added junk in the air) this color shift can be very pronounced.
And one more thing – Fewer people in the morning. There are fewer people out in the evenings as well, but sunrise is great if you want to photograph without a lot of extras in your scene.
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The Photography Tip of the Week #065
Photography Tip Rewind – Get in Closer
065 Photography Tip of the Week (audio)
Every now and then I feel it’s important to rewind the clock to reiterate, re-stress and remind you of some of the more important tips. These tips are often so important you will hear instructors say them over and over. The rewind for today is “get in closer.” When you compose your photo you need to get in as close as possible. Here are several reasons why getting in close is so important.
The subject of your photo becomes very clear when you get in as close as possible.
1. The subject of your photo becomes very clear. It’s hard to mistake the subject when it’s the only thing visible in the frame. Now if you have to have something in the background that you want to focus on as well, that’s fine. That’s a different type of photo where location of the subject is as important as the subject itself. But when that’s not the case I’ve seen so many photos that have too much going on around the edges and this is distracting and sometimes confusing to the viewer.
2. The subject of your photo becomes very clear. There is a sense of becoming when you get in really close. In a digital sense, I believe that this becoming is related to how many pixels are used to create the image. This is why cropping in tight around your subject is not the same as getting in close with your subject. The closer you get the more pixels you have and the less of a distraction any one out of place pixel will be to the whole. So getting in close changes the image from a bunch of pixels creating the image to a bunch of pixels that have become a photo.
3. The subject of your photo becomes very clear. For most photos the background will naturally go out of focus when you get in close and the only thing that remains clear in the photo is your subject. You can of course tweak this with setting your aperture as low as possible to change the depth of field. This isn’t the only way to change the depth of field, but it is by for one of the simplest.
And one more thing: The subject of your photo becomes very clear. This is your photo, and you need to stress your artistic sense. If you can’t interact and get in close to your subject while you are photographing it, it really isn’t your subject, is it? If you can’t interact with your subject and end up photographing from a distance, how do you expect anyone else to do the same when you show them your photo.
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I Don’t “Get” Grunge
It could be my age, it could be that I have a different ascetic sense, but I don’t “get” grunge. I’ve seen so many tutorials all over on how to get a grunge look and how to use lots of plugins and filters. The steps are sometimes very complicated and time consuming. I don’t want to spend all that time working on an image unless I’m trying to clean it up. But did you know you can do grunge in-camera, sorta. When I’m asked to do a grunge look, this is what I do:
Start by blowing out the image with a flash.
1) Use enough light to blow out the subject. Yes this creates and Image you would normally trash. But this is grunge after all, it is trash.
Then re-expose as far down as you can go
2) In Camera Raw/Lightroom/Aperture re-expose as far down as you can go.
There are some other sliders you may want to over-drive, but that’s it really. Once you have the image on your machine it takes 10 seconds. No need to load into an image manipulation program unless you need to resize or remove some clutter. I’m sure I’m missing the point of grunge, but does it have to be anymore difficult than this?
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