- Bonjour Madames et Monsieurs.
In this episode I'm going to show you
how to shoot the supermoon 2016.
Bonjour Madames et Monsieurs. My name is Serge Ramelli.
I am a French photographer from the beautiful,
the amazing city Paris, France living
in Los Angeles, California.
And I just wanted to show quick tutorial with you
because last night I shot the supermoon 2016
for the first time and I'm gonna walk you
through everything, the gear I'm using, how I retouch it,
how I got this photo.
A lot of people is telling me that the part
of the planet where they are is very clouded
so I'm going to give you all the RAW files
to create this final image so you can see for yourself
and you can practice with it.
So follow me in Los Angeles, California
and let's shoot and retouch the supermoon 2016.
(ethereal electronic music)
Alright, just a quick tutorial to tell you
how I did this photo I posted yesterday night
after the supermoon and it went, not viral,
but it did really well on Instagram and all social media
and a lot of people asked me how I did this
so I'm going to do a quick tutorial on this.
First, let's talk about gear. Let me go into Lightroom.
So I shot this with a 70-100 I actually bought
for the occasion.
It's a lens from Sony. I think I have it up here.
70-300, I'm sorry.
It's a 1,200 dollars lens with my Sony a7RII.
That's what I shot with so you need to be, I think,
and I was very far away from downtown,
very, very far away from downtown.
I was on the Baldwin scenic hill overlook in Los Angeles
where you have the view from downtown from very far
so I had a friend who was shooting 200mm,
it's really the minimum requirement to do that.
So I was at 300, if you look at my settings,
I was at 1.6 of a second f5.6 ISO 100.
Now, the truth is what I did,
and I think that's what you need to do is,
I was, every shot I was HDR-ing.
So this one was at 1.6 second at f5.6.
F5.6 was the wider I could open this lens
but, you know when you are focusing something
that is very far away, f4 or f5.6 is still good enough.
Everything was sharp.
So what I did is, I would take,
so that's the normal exposure,
and I would take the underexposure,
and then I would take an overexposure.
And I was doing that every time, at every second,
so, normal exposure, underexposure, overexposure,
okay, underexposure.
So the normal exposure are already retouched
that's why they don't look the same
but you see the reason I did this is that
if I would only take the normal exposure
there is almost no detail in the moon.
You see, even if I bring down the highlights,
look, there is nothing there; it looks really ugly.
But if I take the underexposed photo, look at this,
this is the underexposed photo
without any retouching at all.
You see how the moon is perfect?
And you can even see that there is
like a chopper here in the moon.
It's crazy.
And there is no trick. This is the RAW file.
This is how big the moon was.
It was really impressive to see.
And as it goes up it goes smaller and smaller
but when it just came out behind,
'cause there is some mountains behind downtown LA.
So what I did first is for the first photo,
lemme put just the one star,
what I did was I first retouched this one.
So, let me see what I did.
I don't even remember what I did.
I put the white balance very blue
plus tint 33, 23 in white balance,
a bit of exposure, highlights, and clarity.
So here is what I did, roughly.
So I open up the shadows,
I brought down some of the highlights.
I don't even know if I brought down the highlights,
yeah, I brought down the highlights completely.
I did this really fast yesterday.
The white balance I went very blue, like 2,500,
added a bit of magenta,
I did my whites,
and I did my blacks.
Okay, something like that.
I added a whole bunch of clarity.
So, I'm just taking this one as reference.
And usually I don't have clarity 'cause I don't like
what clarity does to the clouds but in this case I did it.
And the other thing that I did is,
I think I cropped the photo very much
to something like this
so that we have,
we are more into downtown.
There is less of that going on.
Okay, that's one thing that I did.
And I also took a brush and I made it,
I went to exposure, made things brighter,
added maybe a little bit of yellow, and just,
I brushed a little bit some of this building
but not a very, just to make them pop a bit.
A little bit here and there, not everywhere,
and not that much.
I always overdo it and then I bring it back.
Just bring back, maybe not so much yellow,
maybe a bit of magenta.
Yeah, just a little bit of highlights here
in downtown Los Angeles so you can really see.
Now, the problem with this photo is
that you see the moon is, there is no details in the moon.
I really want to see, look at the underexposed photo.
I want to see all that.
So then what I did is once I've retouched the first photo,
maybe add a bit of contrast, made it a bit brighter.
When I'm happy with the first photo, I'm happy with the city
but I'm not happy with the moon.
So what I did is I took both of these photo
and I did Synchronize and I checked everything
but the local adjustment.
I don't want the brush, what I did on the brush,
to be on the other photo.
So now if I look at this photo
it has the same cropping than this one, okay?
It has the same cropping than this one.
And now what I just did is,
I'm gonna take,
now the overexposed photo I don't need
so this one I'm not going to take,
I'm going to give it a zero note
because I'm filtering by only photos that are one
so this one is going to be out.
And now what I'm going to do is, whatever I did here,
you know, I think I went a little bit more magenta
on this one than on here.
Let me see.
No, plus 23.
I'm trying compare 'cause there is a difference
in the photo.
Let's see, what did I do different here?
Anyways, yeah, it's a different feeling.
I think I brushed more of the magenta here.
Anyway, it doesn't really matter. I like that look also.
Now, once you have that, so I have these two photo,
I have the normal exposure and have the underexposure
that has the same colors.
The underexposure has the good moon, okay?
And what I'm gonna do is that I'm gonna take
whatever I got here on this underexposure,
I'm gonna select all my photos except this one,
that's the final result, and I'm gonna click on Synchronize
so now all my underexposed photo are gonna
be have all the same cropping.
They're gonna have the same colors
than this underexposed photo
which was what I did on the first photo, okay?
So here I am, now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna select
all these photos so the first photo which was corrected,
the underexposed photo which was corrected,
and another photo that I took a few second ago
but it's the underexposed photo,
remember every time I was doing HDR,
so I'm only taking the underexposed photo
because all I really care on the other photos is the moon.
And how many moons do I need, I need four.
So one, two, three, four. So I should be good with that.
Okay, and I'm gonna right click and I'm gonna click Edit
and Open as Layers in Photoshop.
Photoshop, the top layer is the photo I'm gonna use,
let me zoom out a little bit, the photo I'm gonna use.
And then underneath you have the different moons
that I'm looking for, okay?
So what I'm going to do is I'm gonna take this first moon,
I'm going to put it on top, okay?
And because remember all I'm looking for is this,
I want this moon to be there.
So then what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take the quick brush,
quick selection tool and make it a little bit bigger.
You can hold onto control and alt key on your keyboard
to make bigger.
I'm gonna select this, okay, now that it's selected,
all I'm gonna do is click here to add a layer mask
and because it's selected, look what's gonna happen.
The layer mask is gonna be black everywhere except
that the moon is white so it just makes that moon appear,
'cause that's all I'm looking for, okay?
I need to do some clean up but I'll do that later on.
Now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna add,
this has a moon, I'm gonna do the same thing,
I'm gonna take the select tool, I'm select it,
click here to add a mask, and now that moon is there
but I can use the move tool
and move it a little bit higher up.
I don't remember how I did it, I think they were very close
so that it's nice and I'm gonna take the next moon,
which is this one,
and I'm gonna select it, W,
and I'm gonna click here on Add a Layer Mask
and boom, it's there.
I'm actually missing a moon so I'm gonna go back here,
that's what I thought, I was missing one moon,
so I'm gonna go to Edit, Edit in Adobe Photoshop CC 2017,
but that's fine because this one was underexposed.
It's gonna go into Photoshop on its own layer,
Okay, now I'm gonna take the move tool,
I'm gonna drag and drop it here over that layer
with holding the shift key, okay?
And I'm gonna put this one under here.
I'm gonna turn the visibility of this one,
and same thing with it,
I'm gonna take the quick select tool, select it,
and click here for a mask, and boom!
It's there and put this one back here.
So now all I have to do is position the moons properly.
A little cool trick is you take the move tool and you can,
I'm not gonna touch this one
because this one is base, right?
But this one I can just right click
and it's going to propose me all the different layers
which is there.
I'm gonna take the first one, it's gonna move the first one,
take this one, take this layer one,
and move this one around, I'm gonna put this one here.
Take this one, move this one around, and take this one here.
Something like this 'cause I could give it a movement.
So I just right click,
and I can reposition every moon how I want it to.
And voila!
And it's funny 'cause as the moon was going up
it was getting whiter and whiter and smaller and smaller
and I was really impressed
because it's the first time I saw a supermoon,
and honestly, it was super.
You can also use the keyboard,
the left and right arrows on your keyboard
once you have the move to select it.
And that's basically it. That's how I did it.
Now all I have to do is do some clean up.
So usually at this point I create a new layer
that takes into account everything that I've done.
So it's command, alt, shift, E.
Crazy! Command, alt, shift, E.
So now this layer takes everything into account
and I'm gonna use the spot healing brush tool here.
There is a little spot that I want to erase here.
I'm gonna zoom in here on the chopper,
see if I can erase that.
Make it very small, want to have a clean shot here.
Look how big the moon was with the 300mm.
I was really happy. Really, really happy.
Okay, and that's that. And now I'm going to save this.
I'm gonna close and save this, put it into Lightroom,
and do one more retouching there.
Back into Lightroom, so now it's just this file.
And usually I always like to open up the shadows a bit more,
bring down the highlights, do a little bit of white,
but I go very little.
I just add a little bit of contrast by doing this.
And maybe add a bit of magenta.
And, oh, I forgot to erase one spot here.
And voila! I'm basically finished with that.
So it's pretty easy to do,
you just have to have some basics of Photoshop.
And now I want to talk about my new HDR masterclass
that just came out.
I've been working on it for a year
shooting all over the planet.
It's based upon Aurora HDR,
it's based upon Photoshop for digital planning,
and it's based on HDR Efex Pro.
Here's a little presentation of all my projects.
It's the best HDR course I have ever done.
It's my third course on HDR for
over the last five or six years.
This one is from far, far the most complete, big.
It's 14 different projects, three hours of video.
Here is the full presentation.
Alright, so let me show you
what my new HDR masterclass is all about.
We gonna start out with this project.
And every project that I'm going to do,
this is the before photo, that's the final photo,
and you can see this also on the youtube video,
this one I put for free on youtube.
But then what I'm going to do is I'm going to go
and do the same retouching in HDR Efex Pro.
Every time that I do a project in Aurora HDR,
I'm gonna do it also for Windows user in the HDR Efex Pro
which is a cool software.
It's not as good as Aurora.
You will see the rendering are not always as good
but you can get some decent result.
That's another project we gonna be doing
which was in my original HDR masterclass
but this time I'm redoing it with Aurora HDR
and so that's the final result.
And one of the cool things that I couldn't do before
is really get, bring back
into Aurora HDR the overexposed photo
to bring in all the street lights, you know, the lights.
This is another project: that's the before photo,
and that's the after photo in Aurora HDR.
So it's a classic HDR shot.
And that is, by the way, the final result in HDR Efex Pro.
It's a different result but still very interesting.
Then we gonna jump over to the Antelope Canyon.
That is the before photo,
and that is a final photo in Aurora HDR.
I'm trying to go for a natural look
but we get all the dynamic range.
Then we gonna jump over to the most ambition.
This on is a bit more complex because not only I show you
how to first retouch the sky, then do the HRD,
and then erase all the people.
So that's the before and wait for it, wait for it,
that is...
the final result.
Pretty cool, no?
It's one of my favorite photo of the most ambition
that I took years ago.
And as usually I'm gonna give you all the source files
so you can really follow along and do it for yourself.
Next, we are going to go to Paris
and this is not Aurora HDR, this is not HDR Efex Pro,
this is Photoshop and digital blending.
We gonna take different exposures to get this result.
So I gonna use a long exposure
to get the streaks of light from the cars;
I'm gonna get the underexposed,
you get all the details of the sunset;
I'm gonna get the long exposure for all the water there;
and do everything with layers in Photoshop.
Then the next project
is the Corsica island, L'Île-Rousse.
This is the before photo
and that is the final result with Aurora HDR.
Look how beautiful that is.
Now let me show you the final result
that I got with HDR Efex Pro.
That it's a little different, it's not as saturated.
I don't like so much the rendering in the clouds
but it's still a good HDR software.
And as I said, every time we're gonna retouch it,
you will have one video for Aurora and one for HDR Efex Pro,
I think except one or two projects at the end.
This is the before photo of an HDR that I shot
in Queenstown, New Zealand;
that's the final result in Aurora HDR.
And this one I'm gonna teach you all about ghost reduction
and the importance of ghost reduction when you shoot leaf,
and water, and things like this.
Next up, we have this photo.
That's the before photo, and this is the final result.
This is an old HDR photo that I did that I loved
and I reprocessed it Aurora HDR.
Every time a new software comes out,
I go into my old RAW files
and reprocess them to see how it could come out.
And this is the best version I ever got.
I love this photo and it was only possible
through four or five layers in Aurora HDR.
You gotta check out that video.
Then,
we have this photo from New York.
That is the before photo,
and that is the final photo.
Pretty cool shot. I like it.
The HDR really brought all the data that I wanted to get.
Then we come to this one
and this one we gonna do some special effect.
I'm gonn do a Hollywood look effect in Aurora HDR.
You have to know that I am a partner with Aurora HDR
and I created and whole bunch of preset.
One of them is called the Hollywood preset
for Hollywood HDR type and this video is all about
how to get that style.
Very popular on Instagram.
Then we have this one which was originally
in my first HDR course and I'm redoing it using Aurora HDR.
And that's the final result.
Love this little Irish bar down in Paris.
Then we have this one.
Now, this one is the most complex project of all
because not only are are going to do an HDR,
but we are going to do a sky replacement
using some of the HDR data.
So it's a mixture between sky replacement and HDR data.
I really love that photo.
Okay, guys, so this is 13 different projects,
three hours of 25 videos.
Most of the project are done with Aurora HDR for Mac
and HDR Efex Pro for Windows.
This is the best HDR course I have ever done.
I am known for HDR.
This is my third HRD course and this is the most complete.
There is over 50 RAW files that you can buy for it
and I'm trying to get the course out
at the lowest price possible with all this data.
Please do not use the source file other than
for learning experience
but you can get a special release price
in the description of the video and not pay very much.
And I'm pretty sure you will love it
and it's gonna take your HDR photos
and your photos in general to the next level.
Check it out, my HDR masterclass 2017.