hey guys welcome or welcome back today we're going to do some reconstructive surgery on some
highlights and an image that we shot within the bracketing portion of the how to shoot
with backlight video oh my goodness that was a long intro uh i'll see you in a sec so like
i've just rambled and said essentially what we're going to do is we're going to look at a situation
like we shot in the previous video on how to shoot with backlight where we used bracketing
or a double exposure technique to get a less blown out area of the sky while still exposing
well for our subject now in that video we did not have bryt with us we had
finn and piper what i want to do is use this image and one that kind of doesn't line up but from
piper's session with finn that is this one which is the background so i found this shot of bryt
which is exposed really well for her but obviously this is just horrific so what we can do is to
try and find the same angle and this is actually the exact same piece of bokeh and sky as is here
so i also took a darker shot which is this one so this image is the same section so just
look at this kind of weird shape here right so the same as this one so obviously there's some
scale differences but i think it's going to be a good exercise because it's not going to be that
easy i'm just going to kind of go through what i would do in this situation because a lot of people
have asked how they would put the two together and how you would make it work so i just want to
cover that off in this video and then we will also be doing a full edit of a backlit sunset kind of
image but i'll come to that in a minute so what we want to do is open both of our files up in
photoshop so what we want is we want one with a sky that's just horrifically blown out and
then we want one with the sky not blown out now technically that is not blown out but it's still
super bright so i would prefer to use this one but this is a really really dark however because
of our knowledge that we know about histograms we know that when we're looking at a histogram
like this one on the screen here our peaks are over in the whites and the highlights are much
more difficult to pull back data from than the shadows so actually we could probably lift the
mid-tones on this image quite substantially and we won't clip anything whereas if we were to go ahead
and do the same thing with this one you see how close that peak is to the right hand side that
peak here is this right that's there so let's go and just look at our highlight peak in this
one our peak at this bit well technically this brightest part is here so we've we've got a little
bit more room to play here so what i actually want to do is bring along the darker one so i'm going
to be using this one and to do that i want to do a command a if i say command and you're on a windows
you press ctrl okay if i say option you press alt and if i say control you right click stick with me
here so we're going to do command a and what that does is it selects all so command a selects all of
the pixels we get the matching ants so when we've done a command a we then need to copy everything
inside so we're going to do command c c for copy and then we're going to go to our reference image
that we're wanting to work on and then we're going to do a command v command v will paste okay so
looking at these two uh images here we can see a massive difference really in the scale of the
bokeh so if you look at the size of this circle here that is quite substantially larger than the
circle that is here so also they're not aligned so this part coming out here is this part coming
out here and what we want to do is try our best to line them up using something like auto align
would be fine but it's very unlikely that it will photoshop will be able to pick those sections up
so what i want to do is just kind of place it roughlyish in the right place and then i'm going
to go over to my layers over here and bring the opacity of that top layer down to about 50 percent
you don't have to be exact here so with that done what i want to try and do is line up these bokeh
circles as best i can and there is definitely going to need to be a little bit bigger because
this circle here that we can just see is supposed to be this circle here so what we can do is get it
roughly in the right position and then we want to do command t t for transform when we do a command
t we get our transform controls up around the side and that means that we can start to change
the size of the layer that's at the top now very important if you do that and it pulls it kind of
just wider if it doesn't go bigger on all sides just go ahead and go back to where it was just
just have the command controls and then do the little link there in the middle
so we want to do is just roughly by eye line them up so just keep pulling
they're not going to be exactly the same size but we'll get them kind of roughly ish i think it's
actually about there i mean that's a little high let's bring her in a bit
okay it'll be about that like i said it's not going to match because these were shot on two
different days and they weren't shot in the exact same place so when we're happy with our
transformation we click the tick and when that tick is checked that transformation is locked in
we can then put our layer opacity right back up to a hundred percent so now what we have
is we've got our darker layer sat over the top of the brighter layer with bryt
no pun intended and just looking at the bokeh they're pretty well aligned
but there's a massive difference and there's still loads of work to do
okay so as normal with me we're going to go ahead and grab a mask so we go up and do a select
subject which has made a pretty good selection we don't really need the feet involved but if we want
to expand that selection we can probably use the lasso tool and just loosely select down here so
to add to a selection you just hold down shift and then you want to just kind of loosely go ahead and
add your dog in okay so this bit hold down shift and we've got her selected so with that done what i
want to do is go select and mask if you don't see select and mask select select a mask okay
we're going to open up select and mask making sure that we were still clicking on our original dog
layer which we were and there is a whole video on how to well there's two videos on how to mask fur
and fluff in photoshop so um i will link ahead to that above and i'll meet you back in a sec
okay so in our select and mask dialog i would always as you guys already know
output to a layer mask so what that's done is that's put bryts mask over here what i then want
to do is just click drag and drop that up onto our um dark layer as it were and turn that layer on
that will give us this which looks ridiculous but don't panic we just need to invert the
mask and change white to black and black to white to do that we just need to do a command
i and command i will invert that for us now do not panic about any haloing edges that we've got here
because that's mainly because there's an issue with the exposure difference those bits are
actually her hair they're not mask gaps most of them there's a couple under here that are
okay so we've now got a floating bryt in the middle of this shot and we have our
background and the dark bit now as we can see in this one we've got some foreground that should not
be present let me turn that off for a sec what i want to do is kind of darken down the areas around
her not massively but just darken them a bit so that we kind of end up with a little bit more of
an equal exposure between her because she's super dark and this kind of greenery around
her so the first thing i'm going to do holding with our dark background layer let me name this
bokeh dark for example and with our original background layer which includes bryt we're
going to do command j which is a duplication of the layer you can also click drag and drop
down onto the little plus icon down there or you can right click and do a duplicate layer
any of the above there's probably three thousand more ways because it's photoshop
with that done what i want to do is go ahead and grab this mask and i'm going to copy it this time
so i'm not just going to click drag drop i'm going to hold down option on the keyboard click
drag drop and what that's going to do is copy the layer mask so now we've got two bryt masks
one of which is on our background layer of bryt which is a copy of the background layer
are you with me just stick with me here we also have our dark layer which is turned off
presently okay leave that off and remember with layer knowledge the stack is important if all of
this is foreign to you there is a photoshop for beginners course and that's available over on
my website um yeah it goes to all this you'll be fine following tutorials after that
so with this what we then want to do is darken down the foreground right so we'll go ahead and
grab a adjustment layer and we'll go for a curves note that that has sandwiched itself
between the dark background and our bryt layer which is perfect bryt as in the dog so
with this curves available what i want to do just grab my mid tones and darken them
to darken your mid tones you literally just put a pin somewhere in the middle of that curve
and you want to just pull to the right hand side that will just darken at your midtones i mean it
darkens everything but you see what i mean so you can either pull right or you can pull down
either is absolutely fine so we just want to darken those down now notice now how basically we
can barely see her because she's so dark and this blown out but is so obviously blown out it looks
horrific don't panic what we're then going to do is with this curve what i want you to do is
only affect this layer the layer immediately below and not this layer as well which it
currently is this layer below is ignoring bryt because bryt is black on the mask
and therefore all we need to do is click this little icon here to create a clipping mask
ignore the words that it's confusing essentially what that does is it says hey you layer only
affect the layer below you ignore everything else so you can either click that or you can hold down
option hover between the two layers until you see that little icon pop up there and then just click
so what that's doing now is if you can see around here that is giving us a exposure change
on the background but it's ignoring bright because bright is in this layer are you with me it's all
to do with the masks because masks are life so what that has done for us is it's equalizing off
the exposure a little bit and things are looking a little bit more neutral so you could change the
opacity of that layer if you wanted to so what i'm going to do is i want to add a little bit to
this selection i want to add this part here so that this is a little bit darker as well
so to do that i'm going to go ahead and grab this mask the one that's blocking bryt
grab a brush by pressing b we're on 80 opacity for the brush which is absolutely fine and i'm
just going to go ahead and dot over there it doesn't have to be exact it's okay
so what that's going to do is just kind of equalize off the exposure so it looks a lot
more natural so now looking at this if well i mean let's look at this so that it's just kind of her
she doesn't look like she's cut out and this is a bit darker which is fab so then what we want to do
is go ahead and turn on our dark background layer and see where we're at so here what i want to do
is go ahead with the mask and i really definitely want to break through because this reed is
above ground level but yet bryt sat on it so she's floating we don't want that so i'm going to
grab a black brush and on the mask that's on that dark layer i'm going to go ahead at 100% opacity
and i just go ahead and break through and it doesn't need to be exact at this stage
it's literally just breaking through but we're keeping that around her head the same
okay so that was too much and go 30% maybe slightly smaller brush and just dot through
okay so we're starting to include areas that that were there in the mid ground but we still
have a mask on the top of her head okay and that's important because this part is super bright here
okay so with that now in we're kind of like looking a little bit more natural but this is
still too dark i mean look at the the level that we have here in the green and then here like the
two just don't match but what we can do with that is quite straightforward we can go ahead and grab
a another curves adjustment layer and this time we're gonna do the clipping mask thing again but
we're gonna do it on that one so this only affects this and this only affects this so with this one
we need to think okay what do we need to do to the dark layer to make it blend better with these ones
well we need to probably lift the shadows so the shadows are down here on the histogram so we need
to just lift up the shadows a little bit and when those shadows are lifted what we can then
do is just kind of bring back the highlights if we wanted to and that will keep the two kind of level
if that makes sense so what you could also do let me go back and just reset that off we'll go ahead
and repeat curves adjustment layer clipping mask what you can also do is grab your little hand icon
here click and drag up to lift that particular point and when you're happy click on another
point and bring that down and what that does is that will keep the two independent and add a point
specifically on the curve for where that sits now looking at this this back bit is probably a little
bit too dark still so what i'm going to go ahead and do is just add a point in the mid tones here
and just lift that up a bit now that is pushing contrast into my highlights which i don't want
i'll grab my shadow pen and just lift that up a little bit so you don't want it to be too severe
because you have to always make sure that this bit looks realistic and it might be that we've
probably maybe overcooked our foreground darkening i don't think so i think that's
actually okay i'm gonna give it a tweak um but that gives us a good level of lightness
our main aim by doing this by the way if we're not 100% sure is basically just to focus the
viewers attention on the lightest part of the image which is what would happen anyway
and we want that at the end of the edit to be bryt's face now you might notice as well
that this area of bokeh is less golden than this area of bokeh so what we can also do is go ahead
stack a another adjustment layer and this time we'll go for a color balance and with the color
balance on we're going to clip that to that layer just like we did before so again these are only
acting on this and with this one what we want to do is add a little bit of yellow
and add a little bit of red
and that's pretty balanced now if you wanted to you could add a little bit of magenta
so you see how it's warm cool warm cool and the two just match a little bit better
it could be that you might say well jess that looks still too dark lift our black
point reduce a bit of contrast on that curve this operating on that layer so at this stage then you
can flatten these off what i personally would do if you're interested don't know if you are select all
of them by holding down shift and clicking from the top to the bottom or the bottom to the top
command g to put them in a group command j to duplicate the group and then right click
merge group this is now a background layer that we can go forward and edit on top of should we
do a full edit i think so i'll meet you back here next time if you haven't already guys please
do remember to press the subscribe button and hit the bell icon man it helps me out so much
and i really really really really appreciate it i'll see you all again really really soon