hi guys welcome or welcome back thanks so much for joining me today we're going
to go through how to take and edit a black background non-studio photograph of an animal
in today's video we're going to look at a horse in the situation and because of lockdown we're
going to improvise and it's going to be epic so if you've always wondered this or if you just
don't really know how to do it then stick around for the start of this video if you want to jump
ahead to the just the editing portion skip ahead through to the time on the screen right now which
you can also get to via the scrubber at the bottom if you haven't already please do remember
to press the subscribe button and hit the bell icon i am jess and i'm here to enrich your life
with all sorts of photographic and life skills and stuff so let's go see how you would shoot
this particular shot so with the absence of a real pony and a real shed we've improvised
pony is here on our makeshift yard surface and we're gonna basically pop a shed on now there is a
very important point to note about sheds big ones usually look better because they've got a much
larger front the important thing to know about the shed and the position of the horse in it is that
you don't want the horse completely in the shed or completely out of the shed you kind of want the
horse to be in the doorway at the point of the shadow first let's work out what light we need
so most people might go and attempt to do this in a full sunny day big sun shine all over the place
that is so bright so in full sun you end up with very harsh shadows on the bottom and actually if
your horse is stood in the doorway you'll end up with straight lines of shadow across the horse
which isn't really ideal so the best kind of situation that you can do this in is light but
soft sunlight so sun that's diffused by clouds like this so with soft light added the harsh
shadows completely diffuse and now it's time to shoot so with your lens and camera prepared you
need to expose for the side of the horse that's outside of the shed and if you do that correctly
everything inside will be black if we expose for the horse on the outside we end up with really
good exposure in terms of what's in the barn now if the horse was further out of the barn you lose
the level of softness that comes on the back end of the horse if the horse is too far in the barn
you end up in a situation where you're fighting the exposure of the barn and the horse so in these
situations if the horse is too far in the barn you then need to change your settings to allow
more light in but if you change your settings to allow more light in you then start to introduce
a lot of background of the barn in shot so it's important to stay just on the outside
what do you do if you end up with a shed that's got way too much light in well guys what you can
do let's put the horse back to the front is use a slightly smaller shed so you still need
to have a decent opening but a smaller shed will create a much higher control of light and shadow
and therefore the difference will be really really obvious so if we were to look at the histogram on
this image that we've got at the moment do you see that there's a very large spike in black the
very large spike in black is the background so there is no detail or data there at all
with these principles in mind let's go ahead and look at the edit and how you would edit an image
shot in this style because obviously lockdown we can't go out and shoot this for you guys but we've
been very kindly given some raw files to work with from jo so jo at wildair portraits absolutely
amazing was my wedding photographer as well though she is an animal portrait photographer
so go and check her out she's linked in the description below jo has spoken to this
wonderful owner here of this beautiful horse and just double checked that we're allowed to use this
and we are allowed so again thank you massively so jo set this up as per the section on how to
set up a uh shot like this jo knows what she's doing i haven't told her how to do it we just
this is how you do it so um first things first we're in lightroom we're just gonna white balance
so because this horse has got white on it it's quite straightforward to white balance the image
i've just pulled down the highlights a little bit because some of them were a little bit hot
but i'm not going to touch these shadows let's turn on the black clipping and
see how far away we are from having the blacks clipped we're pretty close i would say i'm going
to leave it not doing that in this particular program we're going to go over to photoshop and
work through the rest so let's right click edit in photoshop and wizz over there first things first
guys duplicating that background layer so we've got our background layer there for safe keeping
but a new layer there too now first things first for me personally looking at an image like this
is my clean up so i'm going to start with clean up um there's a super useful video which goes through
ways to remove things in pictures i'm going to link that above but i'm just going to go
through and do my removals all of the methods in that particular video would be relevant for this
you could if you wanted to just go ahead and paint black everywhere but i like to
do things like this first and then work through my blackness afterwards
okay so when it comes to removing collars leads things like that you can go ahead and use
just the spot removal tool or you can use one of the other tools i like the healing brush tool
personally because i think it does a nice job of correcting and healing through different areas and
you just want to take multiple different sources to make sure that you get a nice clean finish
i'm not going to spend too long doing this right now
because you know i'm not working on precision here but basically you
do a super neat job as neat as you possibly can and then move onwards
okay so a little bit of a rough clean up there but you get the idea oh just double check that you've
got the reflections and any shadows that are coming through and with that all sorted i'm going
to duplicate this layer again and then grab a crop and just make sure my composition works nicely
it's absolutely fine at this stage to not be too worried about what's going on in the background
so use your compositional tools and make sure that everything's looking and nice i've used content
aware in this instance but honestly you could just go with empty pixels and paint them in it's
not a big deal so now i kind of want to assess where are we at in terms of everything else i'm
going to switch this into a smart object by right clicking and doing convert to smart object that
will mean i can stack filters on top so just to make this process as quickly as possible i
want to be able to go in and out of my camera raw filter so filter camera raw filter um basically
to speed up my workflow i'm going to switch on my black clipping over here just so i can see if
we've clipped anything and then i'm going to start bringing down the blacks a little bit and then i'm
going to go into my radials here and i'm going to add a radial reasonably large make sure that no
settings are happening at all and then bring down the blacks i'm going to switch that to invert
so it's working on the outside and i'm going to bring down the overall exposure and the shadows
and the highlights of that and what that does is it softens through the background there in terms
of shaping the light around the horse i'm then going to zoom in holding down on option or alt and scrolling
through with my mouse and grab the eraser tool which is going to erase the setting effect
from the horse so i'm going to erase with high flow high feather just making sure that it's not
affecting the ears because they're close to the edge and then i'm going to click ok and that will
put that straight back out there on the background so what that's done is that has actually put this
sort of darkening effect around the edge of the image but it's left off the ears and what it's
done as well if you look at the lightness or brightness of the back end of the horse here
it sort of brought it down a little bit so that it looks a little bit more realistic like we have
actually shot this in a studio so the next thing i would probably do from here is just make sure
that we can really drop that background down into black so we're going to obviously do a mask like
we normally do so we do select subject and with the subject selected we do select select a mask
and from here we just want to make sure that we've got some good edges and using the brush i would
use the alt or option button on the keyboard and just rough deselect this area under here
then going around the horse with the refiner edge tool reasonably small ish we're just going to
whizz around not really being you know too careful if you've got a black horse you're going to want
to do this a lot more carefully because obviously black horse you've got dark pixels next to very
dark pixels and therefore you might have an issue so you just do this carefully do it quietly and
whizz round okay so with a quick whizz round done we would then want to go back with the normal brush
tool here and reclaim areas that should not have been uh removed in that selection also just double
check that your edge is at zero percent over here because that will make a difference and
we just want to go around and just say actually photoshop i'm a need that section of the pony
and when you're reasonably happy with the selection
go ahead and make sure it's outputting to a layer mask and click ok so with that done we
then go ahead and add a solid colour layer and that solid colour layer is going to be black
with that done we then move this mask up onto this layer and then invert it so to invert we do
command and i i'm just gonna just double check i'm happy with the edge so we're gonna probably
have to bring it back a little bit over here but that's fine so we'll invert that mask and
now technically we've got a solid background you can see that the edge here is a bit too severe
so i'm just going to go through with a brush on the mask on a low opacity probably maybe 20
and i'm just gonna go through with a black brush and just bring some of this back because the
background over this area was very very dark i don't think uh is going to be too much of
an issue to bring that back same with the ears and we're just bringing some of that
back a little bit more down here i'm going to go 30 percent and then just get that detail back
like so i'm happy with that now and that's pretty good i'm gonna grab a levels adjustment
and i'm gonna basically set this up so that i can see if the background is actually black
and you can do that by grabbing this pin to this side and bringing it all the way
over so when you get to about here you can see what's black and what's not black so for example
here now because we've got this handy little layer set up we can click on the mask with the black
switch it to white brush reasonably hard ish not too hard and we can just go and start to bring
through some of that black be very careful not to go over the line of the horse and
this basically just correcting what we've just brought back in in terms of the detail
i want it to be a pretty good edge because i'm a perfectionist but you know you don't need to
do this until you're going to go to print to be honest um but yeah stay to the outside of the
line of the animal when you're working through this particular technique because otherwise you
will cause yourself no end of problems now if this was gonna you know go to an award i would
make sure that that was completely cleaned up but i can do that at the end when i flatten it with a
burn tool so i'm not that concerned right now that's fine for me so i'm going to now delete
to remove my levels layer and we don't need that anymore what i do want to do is lighten up these
ears because they're a little bit too dark for me so i'm going to grab a curves adjustment layer
and with that curves adjustment layer done i'm going to lift up the mid tones and
i'm just looking at the ears specifically i'm bringing a little bit of contrast back in there
and then copy my mask so to copy option or alt click drag drop and then i'm going to invert so
it's working on the whole thing and then i'm going to grab a brush big brush it needs to be on black
100 percent i'm just going to take out what i don't want lifting in exposure so it's literally just going
to be working on those ears and you could if you wanted to be super specific and take out
some of the lower parts of those ears so it's just tops that get a little bit of an accentuation
and the difference there is that you can actually see them okay next step would be definitely to
work on the horse itself so we would start with an iris enhance i go to my actions but
um this is just a curves layer pulling the middle up to the top inverting this mask grabbing a brush
and with a big soft brush on 100 percent we want to just do a dot over the eye so make
sure that the brush is the correct way around harden that off switch the palette
like so and then remove it from everywhere that is not the iris at the bottom with that done
make it slightly bigger slightly softer and remove it from the top side of the eye and zoom right
up in there hard brush and you want to flip your brush to put white in that section now i know this
is going to be too strong so i'm going to flip my brush again nice soft brush now and go to maybe 50 percent
and i'm just going to knock that off the top so with that done the eyes brightened considerably
we can bring down that effect but the eye has got some personality to it now makes a massive makes
a massive difference so next step is going to be to contour to contour you guys know me
we do command shift n for a new layer we change the mode to overlay and then we check the fill
with overlay neutral colour when we've done that we end up with a grey layer on overlay so that means
we can paint on that with black or with white and it will have a darkening or lightening effect with
contrast so we're going to use a 20 percent brush on white for now and we're going to just a nice
soft small brush and we're just going to go around the eye don't have to be too precise
just around the eye so with that done i'm then going to switch it to black and just darken the
pupil strip remember horses eyes the pupil is kind of like horizontal not vertical or circular
so with that done i'm going to zoom out make my brush slightly larger switch it to white go to
10 percent probably and i'm going to start following the natural highlights of the horse's face so anywhere
where there is a natural highlight i'm going to add another one does that makes sense so anywhere
that is a natural highlight not completely white natural highlight gets an accentuation using this
layer okay next we switch the palette to black and then we do the shadows the natural shadows
okay i'm happy with that so if we group those layers together including the one that's working
on the ears and we'll call that horse and turn those on and off you'll see quite a marked
difference and if we zoom out we're now starting to look like we're a studio photo you could add
a vignette over here if you wanted to i'm going to add a little bit of contrast so i'm going to
go for a levels in this situation i'm going to hold and close the gap to the highlights i'll
include a link to a video on levels bump above but basically we want to close that to the point where
we see highlights and then back off and then for the blacks we can bring those in a little bit just
to take care of those extra little extraneous ones and probably go to there and that gives us a bump
of contrast so with that done then it's the case of just finishing up however you would like to
and that's it so that is the black background studio photo without having studio light so
natural light black background work you can use this on any animal on any subject just to
make sure that you get the principles correct from the shooting portion and if you have any
questions please drop them into the comments box below i'll see you all again really really soon