Pixel Light Painting

Camera Settings Canon IDs Mk2 Canon 28- 70mm lens set to 70mm Exposure 13 Sec@16 50 iso Postproduction Done In Photoshop CS3 Hi my name is Simon Plant and I’m a photographer and I run prophotinsight.net. I’m going to show you a quick tutorial on one of my images here and many years ago when the doctrine printing was still done in mass, there is a technique people use on black and white prints, the chemical was – I can't remember the technical name for it, but it was liquid light. It's basically a bleach, and it will enable you to paint on the chemical and certain areas to highlight and increase the contrast of living in certain areas too. It would help you draw your eye into that part, the print and basically give a nice a glow to the print. So, I’m going to show you a digital way of doing that and within Photoshop. Here is my finished picture, which was shot and done in the Southwest of England a while ago. There was actually a very bad storm in the summer and I just want to do some really nice long exposures at dusk and I wanted to – when I got this image back into Photoshop, I did quite a lot of work on that, so I’ll show you and the idea of highlighting just some parts of the image is a technique I use on this particular shot. So I’ll just show you some of the layout that’s go into this. First of all I want to show you the actual raw image as we saw it. So you can see it's a lot lighter than what I finished that with and basically, it’s the best idea when you're photographing any kind of scenes to goes much light onto the scenes as possible. And you can always darken the picture down but if you lighten stuff too much or darken stuff too much, you can run into problems. If you lighten stuff too much you can just click the highlights and you just have no information, the end of the total range, if you darken too much when you come to lighten the picture in post production, in Photoshop, you're going to lighten the image, but you're going to gain a lot of noise and unwanted side effects, so always try and get exposures as closely and correctly as possible. And if in doubt, little bit over exposures is better than under exposure too much, but if in doubt, bracket it, that’s why — So I’ll teach you some of the adjustments I made on this particular image. Obviously, I wanted to darken the picture down now, if I just go and show you how I did that. I'm making a curve adjustment. Now, if I just darken this image, it's going to darken the whole scene which maybe what you want, it may not be, it's not always what I want to work. So what I’ll do is basically do that and then click okay but then go back into and make sure your adjustment layer is highlighted and set your full diagram kind of a black-- just make sure that is black, and then get little paint bucket and just fill the adjustment layer be black on that and takes away the adjustment. A little phrase always good to remember, especially in this video is “white reveals black conceals” that means -- and I'm making white on my layer mask is going to allow the adjustment flow through, ending in black and it’s going to hold back the adjustments so at the amount will feel this adjustment layer be black and that holding back the adjustments. And all I did with this light is got the gradient tool and basically, made the adjustment layer, I allow the top of the picture to have the adjustment and that’s didn’t affect lower regions as I will toggle for you now. S. you can see this darken the sky, but it hasn’t affected so much the bottom. And this adjustment layer is very soft usually, I just click on the layout key, pressed in and you can see the adjustment there. So that’s how I produce that layer which is this one here, so which is darken the sky. I then, did the same thing again, but I just darkened the full ground of the picture. And so, it just gives that little bit of flexibility really, so maybe you want the sky to be slightly darken than the sea and so forth. And that’s --I think a better way of doing it. My next layout on this form was adjustment that allow you to – for the color, and I basically just treat this, against it, just allow some layer – I'm not working throughout on the image, and so you can go back and forth in that if you want to. With this one, I just kind of choke a little bit of the blue at the picture, like so. Again, I can give a hint for this side, and let's say I change my mind, certainly I can go back here and adjust that. Just one more suggestions, I didn’t mention, when you’re making — I’ll just show you again. And let's say we’re making adjustment layer and we really darkened the picture down, like so. Obviously, another side effect which sometimes you will, sometimes you won't is actually also shifts the color and makes the colors a lot more saturated. Now, if you don’t want that on your picture, all you need to do is go into that layer and change the amount from normal to luminosity and that, as you can see I just tool back that again, that’s luminosity mode, that’s normal, it doesn’t -- largely to make the adjustment without the color shift, so that’s something to bear in mind. I didn’t worry about that on these layers, it didn’t really matter to me and in fact, it's quite nice and real color in there. And then, I did another course, this is a global one, but it's a little bit more controlled, but it was a global one for the whole picture. And this layer is something I do quite often, I’ll just show you the layer. I basically done – given the course layer, but I'm only allowed that course layer to adjust the edges of the image. So what that in fact does is it allows the eye to be so captured within the center of the frame where all the actions are going on and just darkens the outer edges. This one is where I’ve just basically done a lightning adjustment layer. Here, like so, again I filled with black and I've painted back in the adjustment just in the area here and you can see I just lighten the sea, that’s all to do in join the viewers attention into that area of the picture. Then I’ve done same thing again, but this time again, painted in the other parts of the waves and the paint brush to it and then I’ve done it again the same with the sky and the clouds and once you get a lot of control over this and maybe we can go back in here and really brighten that up. Probably it would look a bit muff and falls, but it just had some very subtle highlighting to the parts of the image. So if we see the sea again and the sky, and again, because we’re just in image you can go in and you can adjust these. You can even go into the individual channels as I’ve done on this one and just alter the color very slightly, alter the colored picture down, a warmer up, either way, so that’s another little trick you can go into, but I won’t confuse you too much. And again you can use these on a normal mode or if you find this a bit of a color shifty, and you don’t want, just change it to luminosity and that will take any nasty color shifts out of the layer. And the lighthouse in the background here are just – so I'm going to try to zoom in on this little bit, but I've down size them, just make the screen resolution, just allow me to be a bit more fluid with the screen castle, it was a big huge image, several hundred megabytes and it slows things right done. So the resolution is not as high on this but if I just turn this off, what I've done here is I've just added a couple of layers and I’ve just painted in with my paintbrush tool just to add a little bit more light in the background because it wasn’t very bright and the way I’ve done this, I’ll just show you this very quickly, about in a layer and I just very simply painted in with my paintbrush tool and with whites. I basically just kind of dub a bit of white on the picture like so. I then gone to filter, blur and just blurred that, you can see that their softening up, just blur that slightly. And then you can change the mode somewhere like screen or overlay or any of these, otherwise use overlay on, and again, it just helps the to draw attention to the area of the picture. It's all about guiding viewers; eyes, 3D image and get them to go where you want them to and that’s obviously a lot more achievable, if you use these kinds of adjustment layers and lightly liquid light type technique, just to help emphasize some parts of the image. So we before we finish, I'm just going to take you through the technique on a layer, so as just so we’re absolutely sure of what we’re talking about. Hopefully wherever you are, so I've turned off this cloud adjustment layer, which is why I produced for that part of the image and I'm just going to take you through the stages of doing that. So basically, I add a curves adjustment layer and I add in and I brighten the air of the picture, maybe a little bit more contrast, as well and you can go a little bit of OTT, because it will drop the opacity of the layer down from here and this is too much. So that’s the adjustment layer I’m now going to fill that with black, full brown to black, and fill that adjustment, and make sure your layers selected and then I can get my paintbrush tool again making sure this time the white is set for the four-way color and I can paste it just go in and gradually just paint in the areas that we want to be lightened, so lots of control. Now, you notice, hopefully you will in the video here, it will pick it up, we got a bit of a color shifts, so as I’ve told you before, is go to your layer mode and change that to luminosity and just gets rid off, as if a magic, that color cast, so you can just carry on. Now, if you do make it a big mistake, you can change, press X on your keyboard or just slit here the four to black and then you can basically take that away, by painting it with black. So remember white reveals, black conceals, so you can take away that with the black as the foreground color. Now, obviously there has to be adjustment layer, because you can do it with color balance, for instance. So here, we can make a color balance adjustment layer maybe and change the colors, horrible, like so. And again, fill that with black and make sure your foreground is nicely set to white, paintbrush tool and then you can just paint that in if you wanted to and also if you’re saying do that but it just gives you a good example there. So yes, a very powerful technique there to use and just again it’s all about control and you can obviously, quite easily control where you want to paint in the adjustments and as I said just try to really -- just draw people’s eye into the image and take them in where you want them to go and that’s what is all about, so that’s one way of doing it. Anyway, I hope that was of interest and no doubt, I’ll come back with another tutorial, hopefully very shortly. If you got any comments about this video, any difficulties, then draw me a light and it’s a sign of prophotoinsights.net and then I’ll try to explain it, that most of you would clearly understand. Anyway, till next time thanks for watching cheers!