Hi Folks Glyn here with a video tutorial for you
this one is roughly 15 or 16 minutes long but I think you're going to find it
really useful because we're going to do is show you how I research this picture
when the original out of camera picture was this one here so i'm gonna show you
how you can very quickly
even though you didn't have a gray seamless background a nice wooden floor
i'm gonna show you how come very quickly and very easily turn something as boring
as the hiss into something like this
okay before we go on with the researching just a few things to mention
the first one make sure you check out the description part of this video on
the youtube channel in there I've included links to three blog post that I
wrote that explain the whole background behind this particular corporate photo
shoot
so you're gonna get to see how the images will let any challenges that we
had how we overcame them
why we didn't have the gray seamless why we didn't have the wooden floor but how
we overcame that so definitely check out that the other thing is to make sure
that you haven't already click on the subscribe button over on the youtube
channel just here could click on that
that way you'll get to know when any new videos if you like this kind of content
you'll get to know any new videos have been posted
rather than going hunting for them or looking at all different websites you
get a little modification setup video has been done and then the last thing is
always things and always things to do
let's have a quick look the last thing for you to do is to make sure that you
sign up for the newsletter if you're lucky you'll get one newsletter a month
now as well as lots of news and items are like kind of stuff
one thing that you do get a newsletter subscriber is the files to download the
you actually see me using the videos
so rather than you sitting there and watching me go through the tutorial and
then trying to find a video / father you can use for doing on you'll have the
exact same file so that's gotta be the best way to learn where you can actually
have the file and follow on step by step and do exactly the same thing
there are three things let's get on with the research in all right so one of the
first things you need to do when you're actually going through this kind of
technique is to make a selection of the people or the objects that you want to
actually add into this new background now with this one here because the
actual background is quite bright and it's very very contrasting compared to
people
it was very easy to select them but rather than actually using the quick
selection tool and drag around the people are very very quick we're doing
it was just getting the quick selection tool and dragging around the background
and you can see that it does pretty much pick up that background and not the
people
really really simply and then only do literally just come into all the other
areas that you would need to select you can see it's dragging into their no
problems at all like so let's just take it off this guy's head just here and
then once you've got the slaves from the background just going to select an
inverse so you can see very very soups connect and inverse so you can see very
very simple quick and easy to do now
of course I've already done that that's not what this video is about and I've
already got a selection made so let's just go to select and load selection i
will actually call mine cut out and you'll see there we got the marching
ants going around all the people and also includes the floor area as well
now the first I'm going to do that obviously want to make it look as if we
did have a large gray seamless that was big enough for these people and this
furniture to be on we didn't have it but we can actually fake it and it works a
treat now we're going to do then with the people selected what I'm gonna do
first of all is go to the Select menu and choose inverse so I am now selecting
the background war well first of all make the band background will look like
that gray paper with the background selected on they're gonna go and get
something like a levels adjustment layer and in the properties at the bottom we
have the outputs a successful bar just along the bottom here which basically
tells photoshop what's the gray . the black . and the white point within the
image and what we can do with the output barberries got quite a bright background
let's grab the bright point which is the white . i started to drag it in towards
the center and as we do that you can start to see we can really bring it down
to a really nice shade of gray because it's an adjustment layer if you're not
happy with the gravy you choose you can always come back and all to it later on
that's the magic of working non-destructively so we'll bring it down
to somewhere round about there that would look like the kind of gray that
would ordinarily have had the on the people so that's too bad
ground done we now need to do the floor so to do that for one who's gonna get my
quick selection tool and I'm just going to drag from the right and drag it all
the way across to the left hand side of the image and first up is a pretty damn
good job of selecting just that kind of floor area there
there are so many as it picture of that I don't really want we don't have to be
too accurate this one because when we add in the wooden floor it will hide all
those areas anyway but obviously want to make this is good as possible so the one
here i will get rid of it is just on this guy's and sole of the shoe just
here
that's just how hold down the alt or option key click and drag to get it off
there as well
so with the floor selected will do exactly the same thing as we did with
the wall
we're gonna get ourselves a levels adjustment layer will use those output
levels the brighter . the white . over here and we'll drag that in as well so
we can see now it actually starts to look like they were on a piece of grey
seamless paper something around about there will be good all right now that
we've done that we can actually treat it as if we ordinarily would have done with
that great paper and we can start adding textures using blend modes like overlay
and soft light
so let's just add that nice texture onto the background
now I've got one here one is going to click drag that over on top of my image
hold down the shift key so it gets centralized so you can see now that's
right at the top of the last back on top of the people
now there is a little bit of color in this one and all i wanted to create a
great texture so let's just be such right that then image adjustments and
we'll go to where we desaturate and then just go to the blend modes of that layer
changes from normal to something like over like so now we'll map itself onto
that gray background wall there so that really does work really well but
obviously because we put on top of the picture is not only on the background
wall
it's also on the people and on the floor so what we'll do now then is we go to
the Select menu will choose load selection
it's just going grab
select the night and saved earlier on called put out which is the one that
goes around the people and the floor as well
and then what we'll do is on a hold on my alt or option key and then click on
the layer mask icon at the bottom of the layers panel and when I do that it takes
the texture off the people and the floor and just leaves it on the background
itself
so now got the texture on the actual background wall there we need to add in
the floor area for this picture as well
no I've got a great texture here this is a Down looking picture for down facing
picture of a wooden floor a works an absolute treat in this i think i got
this from someone like I stock photo
this is click drag that over now into our picture
hold down the shift key so it gets put right in the middle and all these are
just hold down my shift key and with my move tool click and drag down was to
drag it straight down and just reposition it just where the wall and
the floor meet and just use the up arrow key somewhere out there looking good
obviously we're looking from the camera . of view straight out these people but
the floor is completely wrong with looking down on the floor we need to be
looking across that
so what we can do here is we can actually go and come under controlled t
to get the transform handles and a floor and optional right click and choose
perspective and this is where you can kind of fake the perspective of that
floor five zoom out and i'm going to grab the bottom left handle here I could
choose the bottom right and i want to do is just dragged out to the left and
that's going to kind of alter the perspective of the floor so actually
looks as if we're looking across it at the people as it would be in real life
let's just drag it out just a touch more now that we've done that we've stretch
it out
we need to scale it down as those floor don't look too big so now in the right
click and choose scale and we'll just drag it in was all the way down like so
this is zoom in now so you can see what actually done so you can see now is
change the perspective of the floor we now need to blend in and just like we
did with the texture for the back wall
we can just go over the last panel and use blend modes so go from north
all to something like over life and you can see how it would great job it does
of mapping onto that now great floor to look as if they read that really was
there if we zoom in you can see the original shadows from the original photo
shoo are all there as well so it just looks really realistic
the only thing that we've got to get rid of is where we can see the floor
cutting through the bottom area of these people's feet and on the furniture will
do that manually just by adding in a layer mask getting a brush with a black
foreground color and i'll just quickly come in and paint it off these areas
here obviously are going really quickly when we do this for real we take out
time so we get a nice accurate job done but let's just quickly get rid of that
just here . and all the way across we can see just by using something as
simple as a levels adjustment layer how we can completely transform picture that
enables into adding the textures it's a real cool trick our thing
not one that I've really seen that much before but it's a real life saver and it
certainly was in this particular photo shoot here for this company
so let's just go to here and just a little bit over on this guy's shoes on
the left hand side
something like so there we go
it's just a quick job just to show you there we've only added in four layers so
far we've gone from something like they're which isn't that inspiring to
hear where there's definitely potential for us to do something and we can really
change things are literally just by diving into camera or so let's dive into
that now
now before we do that let's just create a merged or stamp like the top of the
last acts so we're going to shift all command a or shift option control and a
two-game merged layer just rename that two merged and then because i want to
use camera filter what i will do is work non-destructively will go and change
that line out to convert for Smart Filters just so that if we want to we
can then dive back in afterwards to make some changes we don't quite like what
we've done so now we've got that layer is now a smart filter or smart object
rather we can go to filter and then can
roar filter and there is quite a few things you can do in here
now I know for the floors just zoom out just a church actually is something like
the gradient here let's go for the gradient filter graduated filter and I
want to click and drag up from the bottom of my heart of our shift key to
keep it straight otherwise it go all over the place
the whole shift key we can drag straight upwards let's get the start . a little
bit higher something like that and then i'll just use something like the
exposure to dark and down the floor so that your eyes aren't drawn to it
the one thing that works really well on the floor i found was clarity because
it's got that wooden texture but I be really increasing that clarity slider
there you can really see how it brings out all the detail and text within that
floor looks a lot more realistic than just being a flat two-dimensional
picture i think it looks great
so something like that and i'm actually use another graduated filter
we don't need to use the clarity on this one but I'm sure to click and drag down
now too dark and down from the topics that background is just a little bit too
bright for my liking
so it goes to me like that we can actually bring the exposure down just
the touch
I had a couple more of these graduated filters in one from the left just a
little bit
let's drag that out like that and one more from the right as well
somewhere whoops-a-daisy we don't want this is co2
to hear something like that's looking good let's just drag that out
I think we're also going to get a radial filter to create a bit of vignettes what
click in the middle and then dragged out was quite wide there now one thing I
don't want to do is dark and down the floor too much with this vignette
what kind of use it for the top so for Christ's a really big lips like that
then click on that middle point and drag it downwards
that should take you off the majority of the floor so that when i do adjust the
exposure can see that it's mainly affecting the top part of the image like
so something like that's good
and then I'll get previous not the adjustment process is just playing
around now just trying to finesse the image give it a bit more of an
interesting look
we can change the exposure and just had some different brush drugs here just a
dark and down add some random shadow patterns onto that background as well so
it doesn't look too uniform
something like that is looking good again on this rushing through this to
show you
so we'll go for that is just click on the hand tool mounts that we go back to
the normal basic tab over on the right hand side here
that's just desaturate the image just to touch you a little bit of a boost of the
old clarity as well as the touch overall clarity there looking good
yeah it's just click ok now and come out of camera roll to see what that's
actually done there so we can see there's the before and there's the after
just with a few non-destructive adjustments what we can do is quite
staggering
now we could stop there but I get up and asked quite a lot about and how I
actually do the color grading of my pictures
so let's just very very quickly dive into that now there are lots of ways we
can do that
there's lots of options i shop and change to be honest with you I do like
to use selective color but one thing I'm really like in a moment is using the
Nick color effects pro for plug-in from google notice it's been discontinued to
rob there's no support for it but it is a free plug-in so i will include the
link to the download so you can get yourself a copy of that if we haven't
got it already because it is a really cool bit of kit
there is no support they're not going to make any more and updates for it but
it's a great one to have their to use as and when to let me just show you how i
use that on this particular picture will go to the filter menu and
music collection and just using the color effects pro 4 and it's kind of a
form of that I go through what I'm doing this particular kind of color graded and
i use three of their presets and we tend to a giant I just I'm just a little bit
the first one I go to excuse me is the cross processing on the left hand side
you will click on the cross processing when we do that on the right hand side
then we got all the options of different kinds of cross processing forms that we
can use and I tend to stick with the very very bottom line here
y is 0 6 and obviously we've got the strength we can increase or decrease
depending on how strong we want that look to be but for my particular formula
i always start off with this one around about 30-35 something like that
we've done that we click add filter so now we can start to build up a bit of a
recipe
once you've done that I go from cross processing to cross balance
this is a really good when we got again what a number of different options here
. tungsten violent storms into third one and there's a few different varieties
but as we just hover over them
you can see what they're going to give you and this one there that one the
fourth one down tungsten to die like one is the one I really like
and we just died in the strength for that and for my particular former quite
high on that one around about the 65 70 mark something like that
leave around 66 click add filter so now we've got two elements in our little
recipe and then finish things off our then go to colorize go to the method on
the right hand side
see which one by hovering over it is going to be usable number two for deaf
and I'm really like in the color field is given to the image again we can use
your strength but this one intend to keep quite low
such three pass to my recipe here we have start off with cross processing
cross balance and then color eyes is a really great way of actually color
grading your images when you are either in a bit of a deadline which one
experiment is a real cool we're doing it and it's free so you can go wrong
we've done that we'll click add filter and it's just click ok now to send it
from the color effects pro for plug-in back into photo
shop takes a couple of seconds and there we go so you can see how cool hat looks
let's just do it another one more little thing I've got my foreground and
background colour here black and white so let's just desaturate again just a
little bit and rather than using a plug-in it's just gonna do something
like a gradient map please great for doing black and white conversions with a
black my foreground color just by clicking on that gradient map adjustment
layer in the top right hand corner
straight out of the bag it gives you an absolutely stunning in black and white
there's very little that you need to do with this i find it really is a nice
little sharp black several great whites in it but we obviously are not going to
completely such right it when you want to
sorry completely desaturate the image to black and white we want to have it just
a little bit of our fate in there and we'll take it down to maybe about about
thirty percent or so something like that
so again lots more that we could do to this image working on you know finessing
it working on the skin tone because we don't have to look a little bit green
slightly at the moment but this is just to get to the point to show you how you
can very simply go from this here to this here literally just by darkening
down your backgrounds give it that fake gray paper look and then you can dive in
with your textures and just really quickly and easily add the mean using
overlay blend mode to soft light or whatever it's a really cool trick and I
find that I'm doing this more and more and more
in an ideal world you would have a huge gray background for a group this size
but we had to go with what we had and like i said before the start
check out the blog entry which explains the whole background behind this
corporate shoe and why we ended up having what we did but they go hope
that's useful and yeah that's it
I'll see you next time