For "get pushed" this week Mike Gifford challenged me to do some smoke photography which, he'd rightly pointed out, i'd never tried before...
Sooooo... excellent challenge! I needed to figure out off-camera lighting (including preventing unwanted shadows from showing up in the background) and where to buy incense... I also needed to learn to do things with layers in PSE that I'd never tried before...
The bits I'm still struggling with are:
1. how to adjust the background in PSE to be perfectly black (or white) without impacting the image...
2. how to focus on the smoke... all the tutorials made this sound easy - but I really struggled with this and ended up with many out-of-focus images...
3. How to make the colour more impactful and vibrant... possibly i just need more white smoke in the image? i do plan to play around some more tomorrow night so happy to hear any suggestions for improvement!
I think you did great, I still haven't done this either. Must remember to buy incense to start with :) I have no idea how to capture smoke think I will go google it now...
I totally see the dress and the shapely figure...very cool on white background as well.
Not sure about PSE, but in Photoshop or Lightroom you can adjust the highlights, shadows, whites and blacks to get the backgrounds looking good. As for the focus, the stationary light (not the off camera flash) needs to casting light onto the smoke, set camera to A priority, and try to focus on the brighter white 'patches' of smoke. For the coloring, I followed Gavin Hoey's suggestion and when you have the background and smoke you want to edit, go to adding a Hue/Sat layer and select colorize (in PS, not sure this is available in PSE) and move the slider to the desired color.
@mikegifford tx... not sure you can do the background adjustments in PSE, but i have lightroom, so maybe i'll experiment with that tomorrow night... PSE does let me do the hue/saturation adjustment layer... in the video he suggests 50% opacity... the ones i posted here were at about 80%... i did one at 100% as well... i guess i figured i should have been able to get a richer colour out of it...
i'll give the whole thing another go tomorrow night if i have the time and see if i can improve on focus... tx for the suggestions!!
You are doing a great job with this push... I love all that it entails as far as learning new techniques and stuff. I see these smoke photos almost as much as the water drops and crowns and they look so simple. Little did I know ;)
This is my fave of the two of them, I'm vain I go for dresses, and green as well :) I can see the breast shape and the hourglass figure, cool, cool, well done you!
Nice job! Your camera will smell of incense for weeks if my experience is anything to go by!
To get the background black or white, I use levels (either a levels adjustment layer or CTRL+L on the applicable layer) and then drag with the left (Black) or right (white) triangle/area until it's inside the histogram shape. I've probably described that really badly.
Not sure about PSE, but in Photoshop or Lightroom you can adjust the highlights, shadows, whites and blacks to get the backgrounds looking good. As for the focus, the stationary light (not the off camera flash) needs to casting light onto the smoke, set camera to A priority, and try to focus on the brighter white 'patches' of smoke. For the coloring, I followed Gavin Hoey's suggestion and when you have the background and smoke you want to edit, go to adding a Hue/Sat layer and select colorize (in PS, not sure this is available in PSE) and move the slider to the desired color.
I like these!
i'll give the whole thing another go tomorrow night if i have the time and see if i can improve on focus... tx for the suggestions!!
To get the background black or white, I use levels (either a levels adjustment layer or CTRL+L on the applicable layer) and then drag with the left (Black) or right (white) triangle/area until it's inside the histogram shape. I've probably described that really badly.