In this video - I show you how to take a small studio background and make it much, much, bigger.
AdoramaTV presents Take and Make Great Photography with Gavin Hoey.
Hello I'm Gavin Hoey and you are watching AdoramaTV Adoroma the camera store that
has everything for us photographers. And today you join me in my small studio and
the key word is small, if you own a small home studio, or a portable studio, one of
the downsides is often your backgrounds are quite small.
This shoot the idea I've got requires a big wide space, a feeling of openness, and
the background I've setup is this, which is actually smaller than my usual
background. Now of course I could shoot this in upright portrait format and just show
you that, but think about it, upright portrait, that would make the pictures
seem a little bit tighter, it won't have that feeling of space, but also
you're viewing this on a wide screen for maximum impact, I want to fill your
screen with image. And I can make that happen by applying a few tricks, one of
them is bit of pre-planning, the other is a trick we can do during the photography
and finally bring it all together with a bit of work in Photoshop so let's get
shooting. Today I been joined in the studio by Adrienne, and she's gonna be the
model, and as you can see we've got a nice simple setup, here I got my balloon which is magically
hovering in the air, it's not, it's attached to a piece of fishing twine and
whole set is quite a tall thin set up. Now that's fine except of course I want
have a wide shot for the internet. So I've got to do a couple of things, now I'm
going to do the post-processing, we'll get to that in a bit but to make life easier,
I got three things I've got prepared. First of all the background, the background on this shot has a
little bit a texture to it, with a white background or a pure black background
then that easy to extend, if you shoot with a more even background, it becomes a
bit harder to extend, but texture, it makes the blending of my
new background, edges a lot easier to the real background, so that's one thing, next
thing is the lighting, I'm going to light this with really soft flat even lighting.
If I had hard lighting, or directional lighting again the Photoshop bit, would just be
just that little bit harder, not impossible just harder. and I want to make life
easier for myself, so I'm going to use the Streetlight360 as my main light, in fact I've got
two of them here, and these lights
well they are bare flash, this isn't going to give me soft lighting, normally for soft
lighting you use a soft box or an umbrella but I'm in a really small studio. The walls
in my really small studio, well they're painted white, if I get my lights I put
them over to the side, and I bounce them off the wall they become a much bigger
source of light, much softer source as a result and that's where I'm going to get my
lovely soft even lighting from, Now we need to meter this, so let's just see
what power we're getting at the moment, I got my flash meter. I'm just going to pop it in the
middle of the scene, will press the test button, I'm getting f8, so that's
absolutely perfect f8, I'm happy to use f8, we can test each individual
light if I like, by kind of standing in front f8... And not surprisingly f8
So it is exactly what you might imagine, lovely, soft even lighting so we got a nice
texture background but nice even lighting, my third thing that's going to
make my life so much easier, is a tripod. Now if I show you all my shots exactly
the same height same position when it comes to adding a new background
well that's just come out like it so much simpler so using a tripod but this
shoot is something that I'm going to highly recommend, and we will pop my camera, an Olympus10F on the
tripod in a minute as we do the shoot.So that's the basics lets actually get on and do the shoot
and start taking some pictures, are you ready
ok
So there we are, we got some great shots there, but my shoot isn't quite done yet, however Adrienne
we are done with you, so you may now leave the stage.
Thank you very much indeed. Take Teddy with you, fantastic. So I've got one more set of
shots to do and my shots basically involve nothing at all. Ok so I'm going
get rid of our model, which we've done. I'm going to take the balloon away, here it goes.
And I am going to take the same shots on an empty set. Same exposure, same lighting, same camera
position, that's kind of important and that empty shot is going to become my
new extended background. So let's get the best of the photoshoot and the empty
frame into Photoshop and we'll do some editing on that right now. So with the
photography done it's time to move into Photoshop and I've gone through the images
and chosen one of my favourites, and the empty background. They both had exactly
the same processing in Adobe Camera Raw. I went for the sort of pinky tone, I felt that really added
to the shot. That's important, they need to be processed the same, let's have a
look at the shots so this is the image I want to use and as you can see it's a
nice shot, looks really good and this is the empty background image. And as you
can see there's no difference other than there's no model and balloon in here. The key
thing the angle of view is exactly the same height above the floor it is exactly
the same. Now I want to make this larger I'm going to get the crop tool. About a
16 x 9 crop preset in there so if I drag that a little bit bigger
that's the amount of space I need to fill in, which is a lot to say the least,
almost three times the amount of the original shot. Now I'm actually not going
to increase my canvas using white, and actually increase my canvas using a red
and this might seem a little bit weird. 'Cause I'm going to cover it all up anyway so why am I
bothering about the colour? Well now that become clear in a second, so that's the new
working area. Let's go grab this image and we'll just select and copy it going
back to the main image and paste this in. Now when I pasted it in, I can get the move tool and
I can drag this over to the side, if I hold shift it will stay nice and level
so you can see I got a bit of room here and if I drop this down, you can see I've got a little bit of
area to play with, and maybe you can start to see why I'm using red as my background colour.
But that will become much clearer when I add a layer mask in here. We'll get a
brush that's black and I can paint with a little layer mask, now, now you can see why
I am using red, so anywhere I just kind of sneak over the edges and get that
little red area coming through, I swap to white and can paint that back out again and
that just helps me to make sure that I fill in my edges and I don't have any weird background
colors coming through. Ok that's one side done obviously I'm going to do exactly the
same to the other side, and well it's exactly the same technique, that's just
come in here and paste it, it will still be in my clipboard and drag that to the side
snap the left edge onto the left edge Upper layer mask in here and again where is it?
Actually it's quite hard to see, there it is in any case, we will get a paintbrush make
sure the paint brushes is black, and we'll come in here yep you'll see immediately
get that wrong, that's absolutely fine, it's so hard to see on that edge, I'm almost wondering
why I'm worried about that bit maybe I should just worried about this bit down
here, yeah, there we go. That's the bit I need to worry about and I'm doing this in a non
straight lines and giving us a little bit of a wobble and a wiggle because I
don't want this to be an exact straight-line, I want some bits from some
images and some from others. ok that's great now, once I've done that I'm
absolutely happy, either flatten the image down or make a duplicate flattened
layer, lets just flattened that down.
And I'm going to look for anywhere where there's an obvious sort of exactly the
same bits here, that's exactly the same bits there, anywhere where there's an
obvious similarity between the two shots to use something like the spot healing
brush or the clone stamp tool, just to today away those little bits just so we have
no exactly repeating patterns. Al least not too many, one or two you can get away with but too
many of them and it will start to look artificial so there we go. I can spend a
little bit of time just tidying that up and there is my final picture completed.
Just because you have a small studio doesn't mean you can't think big and
create big as well, if you enjoyed this video and you want to see more from
myself and the other amazing presenters here on AdoramaTV, you know you've got
to do you. You've got to click on the .. oh no I've broken it... click on the subscribe button..
I'm Gavin Hoey, thanks for watching.