Ahoj! This is Zdenka. When I see some idea I just have to try with my own flavor, with
my own style and this is what I was working on this week. Here is a final
masterpiece. Product poster the dramatic way.
If you are new here, welcome. My name is Zdenka Darula. If you want to learn how to
take better photos and videos with your latest gear and possibly participate in
creative chimera challenges like this one, consider subscribing.
In today's video let me show you step by step behind the scenes how this was
photographed and also how it was edited in Photoshop. Step by step tutorial, very
long video. First of all Bailey's is not a sponsor of today's video as we are at
home... thy actually don't even know me.... as we are home we wanted to order some
nice treat and I was looking for a classic Bailey's but they don't have it
because they don't have much these days. Aand this thing popped up so we grabbed
it and then when it arrived I kind of thought hmmm maybe we can try to use
it to shoot this poster and product poster. It is not the only thing which I
will be making with this product. Next week I will be filming a video
commercial so don't forget to subscribe. Splashes. I love working with
liquid and splashes. I created lots of stock photos in the past. I feel
comfortable with it and it's a lot of fun so naturally I wanted to create a
very dramatic over-the-top image. And I actually googled ads for this type of a
product and from what I saw and I know what they were going after, the same kind of
feel, the same tone... so pinkish creamish whitish photos and I understand why they
did that, I understand why they chose it but it's not my style. I gotta say that
I'm more going after bold kind of images, strong images, colorful. To me these
colors kind of remind me grandma's living room. So that's what I try to
accomplish, do something very different. I like more contrast, edgy,
stronger colors, I guess more European look. Colorful ...strong... yeah. That's the
word...strong. Looking at the bottle I see pink, red,
gold, brown tones, so I chose this brown background and I honestly wish I had a
little bit of darker one but I'm going to work with whatever I have. First I
placed it on a table and I started placing some objects around but then I
realized that I may be dripping the liquid on a table on a paper so I went
for the plexiglass which actually looks better as it created a reflection. And I
knew that I would have to do some cleaning in Photoshop because this is
not a new glass. It's got a lot of scratches. So my plan was to take the
photo of this whole stage setup and then take photos of falling strawberries and
falling chocolates. I didn't have to take photos of milk splashes because I took
many of those in a past and then take everything and digitally compose it in
Photoshop. My main light was the continuous ring light. I didn't want to
work with flashes because of my eye and I also wanted to have a clear visual
because those falling strawberries and chocolates were shot in a burst mode. I
placed a ring light from the top pointing straight down. I was also using
two more lights. This Falcon f7 LED light and Weeylite LED light. As I was
placing them on a table, one of them accidentally fell down and it was a
pretty good accident because look at how it shines below the bottle. And at that
moment I thought I'm gonna actually use the gold color or more warmer gold
almost brown tone. I was also going to use flash light because it was creating
these awesome spotlight on a bottle but I had trouble with it. I took it apart
and it never worked again so I was stuck with the smartphone flashlight
which was okay. I had to kind of work with it. Simply put don't ever lend me a
flashlight because there's no guarantee and I'm gonna return it back to you in
one piece. The camera I was using to take the basic shot was Canon 5D Mark III
with telephoto lens 70 to 200 millimeters. Once I had pretty much
everything in place, I just added chocolate ice cream and vanilla ice
cream, strawberries and chocolate. Let me just say, the smell in the studio was
unbearable. I was playing a bit with the aperture as I wanted the bottle sharp
possibly the first right ice cream as well but the rest I wanted out of focus.
So I did few variations f/4.0, 4.5, 5.0. I took many photos of different light
positions as well so I can choose few which will work. I am NOT a planner. I
always create on a spot. I do have some sort of visual in my head so I kind of
start with that. Milk splashes I already had my computer. I took many of those in
the past. I didn't have chocolate falling shots and strawberries falling shots. For
those shots I used Canon m6 mark 2 as it takes really fast continuous shots in
sports mode. I had the same lens 70 to 200 millimeters with Viltrox speed
booster. I had my assistants to drop the chocolates and strawberries and I was
actually throwing them in the air myself as well as they were too heavy and they
were going down way too fast. You know they sell these huge
strawberries now. You cannot buy regular small size strawberries. I didn't want to
waste too much time so I just had it on automatic sports mode only lowered the
brightness a little bit. I focus manually though with the lens. And now that I had
all the pieces of the puzzle photographed, it was time to import it to
Photoshop and actually finish the final puzzle by composing the shot. First thing
I did was editing the main base image in Adobe Lightroom. I made it brighter, more
contrasty and changed the colors a bit to get the color compliment each other
in the image. Once I was done, I saved the image in TIFF and open it in Photoshop.
I also imported an image with all my milk splashes. I already have them
cropped out. I had them saved as PSD file where all splashes are already layered
to save a lot of time. I simply drag them all
on the main image and then just like puzzle pieces I dragged each splash and
resized it to position I want and erased parts I didn't want to be there.
Strawberries and chocolate were a little bit more work as I had to crop them out
first and then I also named all layers so it was easier for me to find whenever
I was looking for one of them. Next I wanted to change those white milk
splashes to match the color of the ice cream and also the Bailey's. The way I
changed the colors of splashes was this. I went to the image adjustments, photo
filter, warming filter and I chose pinkish color and I left the strength at
85% roughly.
Then I went to layer style, selected inner shadow and again I choose pink
color selected strength 35%. Then I checked the gradient overlay, made my own
custom color. I did the pink tones again and I toned it down to strength about
32%. Once I had everything composed in place and colored, next step was make all
splashes, strawberries and chocolates a bit blurry to go with the ice cream. I
went to blur Gaussian blur and selected strength between three to four point
five. I did them all individually as I wanted to tweak them separately and then
I also brightened all chocolates and strawberries. For candles I added flames.
I edit them as layers and then used overlay.
I think lighten. I also added lens flare to them. I simply went to filter, render
and lens flare.
To bring more texture to the background and to those splashes I just added
overlays of some bokeh images and smoke. Lasts touches followed. I flatten the
final image clean up the splashes where it was connecting with the ice cream and
did some contrasts, darken some areas and finally added more sharpness with
texture tool in Lightroom. Done. It's time to announce the next creative camera
challenge. By the way submissions from last month will be reviewed in a video
separately next week. So the challenge for the next round is find an
object in your home. It could be a box, it can be a final product, just a product
which will be your main object for creating an ad. It doesn't have to be
very complicated like I had it. It doesn't have to be full of splashes and all that
but just nice lighting, just very colorful or just eye catching poster
ad would be quite nice. Deadline to submit your images is May 30th 2020 and
you can either upload them to ZD camera challenge Facebook group. The link is in
the video description below or also to your Instagram account and use
#ZDchallenge14. The most interesting final images or digital compositions
will be reviewed in a month. Hit the thumbs up if you liked today's video.
Don't forget to subscribe to all future videos. If you have any questions,
comments, simply want to say hi or ahoj, you know that you can always leave it
in a comment section below and I'll see you, I'm looking forward to seeing your
work, in the next video. Cau... Ahoj...