Ever look at someone's photo and think, How did you capture this or How did you acheive this?
Post a photo of something that has caught your attention.. And maybe the owner of the photograph will give you insight into how they achieved the shot.
For example.. I would love to know how Carl acheived this :
I'm a novice at photo compositing so if anyone has any tips they'd like to pass on so I could improve my shot, please do :)
Anyway...
I made life as easy for myself as possible by shooting both subjects; my daughter "asleep" and the (big) matchbox in my hand under the same lighting conditions. I had natural light from two windows and a glass panel door behind me. Having the same lighting considerably reduces the amount of work I'd have to have done when "fixing" the photo to make it look as real as possilble.
I took about 8 shots of my daughter from several "above and to the right" angles. I then held the matchbox in my hand and, held out beyond the minimum focussing distance of my 50mm lens (about 12-14") took about 8 shots.
Back on the computer, viewing the thumbnails together it was really easy to see which shots had the closest matching perspective.
I loaded the hand/matchbox into a layer in photoshop and then added my daughter's photo in a layer above that. My daughter's layer was scaled down to fit in the box and needed an ever so slight rotation too. Obviousy the top layer now obscured the bottom layer. I added a "show all" mask to the top layer and reduced the opacity to 30-40% so I could see both layers together to help with the next step. I then painted with a black brush onto my daughter's layer mask to reveal the bottom matchbox layer and likewise any mistakes were repaired by painting onto the mask with a white brush to reveal the top, "daughter" layer.
I then zoomed in very close on the "join" between the two layers; around the edge of the pillow for example and used a very soft brush (0% hardness) and low opacity ~5-10% and painted on the mask in black or white to merge the layers to look right.
Don't forget to turn the opacity of the top layer back up to 100% after you've masked in/out the background otherwise you'll be wondering why the photo looks a bit, well, see–through ;)
This next step is important. I used the burn tool to create some shadow on the pillow where the matchbox would have cast one but which, obviously wasn't on the pillow shot because the pillow wasn't in the matchbox when I took it :P This helps alot, especially I think along the edge of the pillow furthest from the camera. The shadow separates the pillow layer from the matchbox layer.
Because I always shoot in RAW I was able to make sure the two photos when brought together in Photoshop were using the same white balance. If you shoot as JPEG you should be aware that choosing Auto White Balance may result in the camera choosing slightly different white balance settings even if the shot was taken under similar lighting conditions. You could always set the white balance in–camera first if shooting in JPEG to force the camera to use the same setting for both shots.
Having created a mask to hide/reveal parts of the top layer, it was possible to re-use this mask to apply adjustments to brightness/contrast just to try and balance the two images.
Finally, I had to fix the DoF. The DoF on the matchbox was centered round about the big M in "Matches" on the box. Because the matchbox (f/3.2) was shot much closer than my daughter and I didn't adjust F-stop enough to compensate the DoF on the matchbox was much shallower than the DoF on my daughter (f/5). You can see the wording on the top and bottom of the matchbox is starting to go out of focus but the shot of my daughter was in focus from the front of the pillow to the back. To try and fix this, I added a Gaussian Blur Smart Filter layer and used a gradient mask to apply the blur to the top/bottom of my daughter's layer (white) fading to black as we approach the centre of the layer where no blur will be applied.
Here are the layers I have in photoshop. Top to bottom.
1. Ssshhh... text layer
2. burn layer (adds shadow to pillow edges)
3. brightness/contrast clipping layer applying some darkness to just my daughter's layer below.
4. My daughter's layer with mask (black) to reveal the matchbox layer below. Gaussian blur smart filter on this layer too to simulate shallow DoF.
5. Matchbox layer. Unaltered.
I hope this helps. Any questions, please just ask.
@sprogz Carl, A huge thank you for taking the time to type up in detail, all of your processing. I really appreciate your reply and the effort that you have placed into giving such specific content in your comment. I cannot say a big enough thank you to you.. :o)
Oh some of you must have seen a photo out there which pulls your curiousity strings.. Give them a shout out so we can work out how they did it.. Or they maybe just as kind as Carl and explain exactly how they achieved their shot :o)
@sprogz This is awesome, Carl. Thanks for sharing with us the detailed steps and all. I don't know anything about layers and would really like to learn. Thanks for the link too. Cheers!
@sprogz you asked for tips so I'll just add, there is only one thing that jars about your image... That is the pillow seems to come up to nearly the top of the box, yet the shoulder height would be a bit higher than that still so wouldn't fit in the box. Apart from that, it looks perfect to me.
I have done similar things with Gimp, in a simpler way, making the top layer transparent, aligning the bottom one with scale, rotate and perspective transform tools, adding an alpha mask to the top layer then erasing the top layer for the bottom one to show through. I'd work in the highest resolution possible then scale it down a bit for the web which is quite forgiving of sloppy masking. I have never tried simulating DOF though so I will try that next time.
@ukcam Thank you for your input. This is just the kind of "another pair of eyes" advice I was looking for and very helpful. I might take a look at tweaking the shot with your suggestions in mind and see what happens :)
Absolutely agree. You gotta work at the highest resolution you can. I also use smart objects in Photoshop and non-destructive masks and adjustment layers so everything can be applied or un–applied in varying measures without destroying (removing pixels basically) the base layers.
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I'm a novice at photo compositing so if anyone has any tips they'd like to pass on so I could improve my shot, please do :)
Anyway...
I made life as easy for myself as possible by shooting both subjects; my daughter "asleep" and the (big) matchbox in my hand under the same lighting conditions. I had natural light from two windows and a glass panel door behind me. Having the same lighting considerably reduces the amount of work I'd have to have done when "fixing" the photo to make it look as real as possilble.
I took about 8 shots of my daughter from several "above and to the right" angles. I then held the matchbox in my hand and, held out beyond the minimum focussing distance of my 50mm lens (about 12-14") took about 8 shots.
Back on the computer, viewing the thumbnails together it was really easy to see which shots had the closest matching perspective.
I loaded the hand/matchbox into a layer in photoshop and then added my daughter's photo in a layer above that. My daughter's layer was scaled down to fit in the box and needed an ever so slight rotation too. Obviousy the top layer now obscured the bottom layer. I added a "show all" mask to the top layer and reduced the opacity to 30-40% so I could see both layers together to help with the next step. I then painted with a black brush onto my daughter's layer mask to reveal the bottom matchbox layer and likewise any mistakes were repaired by painting onto the mask with a white brush to reveal the top, "daughter" layer.
I then zoomed in very close on the "join" between the two layers; around the edge of the pillow for example and used a very soft brush (0% hardness) and low opacity ~5-10% and painted on the mask in black or white to merge the layers to look right.
Don't forget to turn the opacity of the top layer back up to 100% after you've masked in/out the background otherwise you'll be wondering why the photo looks a bit, well, see–through ;)
This next step is important. I used the burn tool to create some shadow on the pillow where the matchbox would have cast one but which, obviously wasn't on the pillow shot because the pillow wasn't in the matchbox when I took it :P This helps alot, especially I think along the edge of the pillow furthest from the camera. The shadow separates the pillow layer from the matchbox layer.
Because I always shoot in RAW I was able to make sure the two photos when brought together in Photoshop were using the same white balance. If you shoot as JPEG you should be aware that choosing Auto White Balance may result in the camera choosing slightly different white balance settings even if the shot was taken under similar lighting conditions. You could always set the white balance in–camera first if shooting in JPEG to force the camera to use the same setting for both shots.
Having created a mask to hide/reveal parts of the top layer, it was possible to re-use this mask to apply adjustments to brightness/contrast just to try and balance the two images.
Finally, I had to fix the DoF. The DoF on the matchbox was centered round about the big M in "Matches" on the box. Because the matchbox (f/3.2) was shot much closer than my daughter and I didn't adjust F-stop enough to compensate the DoF on the matchbox was much shallower than the DoF on my daughter (f/5). You can see the wording on the top and bottom of the matchbox is starting to go out of focus but the shot of my daughter was in focus from the front of the pillow to the back. To try and fix this, I added a Gaussian Blur Smart Filter layer and used a gradient mask to apply the blur to the top/bottom of my daughter's layer (white) fading to black as we approach the centre of the layer where no blur will be applied.
Here are the layers I have in photoshop. Top to bottom.
1. Ssshhh... text layer
2. burn layer (adds shadow to pillow edges)
3. brightness/contrast clipping layer applying some darkness to just my daughter's layer below.
4. My daughter's layer with mask (black) to reveal the matchbox layer below. Gaussian blur smart filter on this layer too to simulate shallow DoF.
5. Matchbox layer. Unaltered.
I hope this helps. Any questions, please just ask.
I have done similar things with Gimp, in a simpler way, making the top layer transparent, aligning the bottom one with scale, rotate and perspective transform tools, adding an alpha mask to the top layer then erasing the top layer for the bottom one to show through. I'd work in the highest resolution possible then scale it down a bit for the web which is quite forgiving of sloppy masking. I have never tried simulating DOF though so I will try that next time.
Absolutely agree. You gotta work at the highest resolution you can. I also use smart objects in Photoshop and non-destructive masks and adjustment layers so everything can be applied or un–applied in varying measures without destroying (removing pixels basically) the base layers.
This is such an amazing shot, would love to find out how ! Thanks.