In this video,
I'll show you
how to create a Fine Art Portrait
with a festive feel!
Hello I'm Gavin Hoey
and you're watching AdoramaTV
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for us photographers
and today in my small home studio,
I'm going to shoot a Fine Art Portrait
with a bit of a festive feel.
In my mind I can see this big star
in the middle of the screen
with lots of small stars above it
and a model looking up at the stars,
the only problem is, this is the only star
I've got, so this is going to do a lot of work
and there will be a bit of post-processing involved,
so let's start by taking a picture of this.
Now to make the post-processing a lot easier,
I'm going to go with a black back ground,
so let's just pop this up,
like that,
and then I need to light the star.
Now I could use absolutely
any sort of lighting for this.
I'm going to go with the specular LEDs
but anything will work
because all I need is a nice flat image
of the star.
Now if you're going
to use LED lighting
and aperture priority mode.
Just make sure you adjust
your exposure compensation
probably -2, in my case
to make sure that black background
is genuinely deep perfect black.
My second star photo
needs a bit of logical thinking
because there's going to be
a bright star in the middle,
lighting the ones along the top,
so I need to light this star
as if it was lit from something below
and in the center,
so that means getting my light source
and getting it lowered down
so I have light coming up from underneath
something like that
but obviously it needs to go for the camera position,
so let's bring that around.
What I need to do with this
is just give it a little spin,
just a gentle spin
and as it comes around to me
and squares up to me
then I can hit the shutter
and get my shot,
so now I've got my two star photos,
I can create my background in Photoshop
and I'll do that before the model gets here
so I can show her the background
and hopefully she'll understand the direction
we're going in. Now the good news
is you don't have to do any of this Photoshop work
yourself because I've turned this
into a template and you can download it
for free. You'll find the link
in the description below.
So now we get to the fun part
of the shoot
and to help me out today
I've got the amazing Lauren!
Lauren is going to be the model
for this and as you can see
she's sat underneath the light.
Now Lauren's seen the background.
She understands the idea behind this
and what we've got
is an eVOLV 200
and it's got a small Diffuser Dome on it.
Now the Diffusing Dome
does a couple of things;
it's smooth the light,
gives a lot more even light
and it mimics the light from the star
in the background. You could do this
with just the bare bulb
but it's much more comfy for the models
to have a slightly bigger light source
like the Diffusing Dome
to look at. Now the whole thing
is on a boom arm
and if you're going to use a boom arm,
you need to take safety into account,
so I've got a sandbag at the bottom,
a sandbag at the end
and that should mean
it's nice and balanced
so it doesn't sort of suddenly drop down
if I undo it? Safety is always Prime
and I don't want that dropping on Lauren's head,
so that's the basic idea.
I've already metered this out for f4,
let's take a shot like this
and see how it looks.
Okay Lauren here we go.
Now if Lauren looks towards me,
it doesn't really work
because we only have one light
in this shot, it's from above
and it's not going to light Laurens face
unless she looks towards the light.
So Lauren,
can you look towards the light for me?
And when she does
that works really well.
Now the light falling on Lauren
is the same as the light on the background
we're going to use later.
Now at the moment
the eVOLV 200 is right up
against the background
and although that works,
it is quite shadowy
on Laurens face
at least on the side
that I can see
from the camera position.
Now to get around that,
I'm going to move the light
ever so slightly further away
from the background
and that should put a little bit more light
on the side of Lauren
that I can actually see
and that works really well.
I'm really happy
how this is looking
but there's one last thing
we can do just to refine the position
that Lauren looks at,
so if I asked Lauren
to look towards the light,
it could be quite uncomfortable,
I'm actually going to ask her to look
just slightly past the light
which is a little bit more comfortable
for the models point of view,
so Lauren if you can just look over here
just behind the light.
Let's take that shot
and see what happens.
Now when Lauren does that
and I go in close looking at her eye,
I can see that the eye is really white
and that is not the look I want.
If I ask Lauren just to look in front
and the other side
of the light,
I can actually see her eye
in the shot
and that looks way better
so when I'm asking Lauren
to look around,
I'm always going to ask her
to look just in front
of the light here.
So that's the basic setup.
I think we're ready to take some pictures.
So Lauren are you ready?
Okay let's do the shoot.
Now you may have noticed
that Lauren was against a gray background?
That's actually really important.
It doesn't matter whether it's paper
or fabric gray background? The gray
will make the post-processing
a lot more effective.
Let us have a little look.
So here's the picture of Lauren
I want to add into the background.
I'm just going to go to select it all,
edit and copy,
and then jump over to the background template.
I've already downloaded it
and opened it in Photoshop
and you'll notice,
there's a whole bunch of layers.
The one I'm interested in right now
is the one that's called;
your photo here
because that's where your photo goes.
Notice it's highlighted.
If it isn't, then just make sure you click
on the area next to your photo here,
so it does become highlighted.
To add Lauren in,
go up to edit,
down to paste
and that will pop her in exactly
the right place, but clearly she's not
the right size. So I need to resize
this because this template
is made for an A4 sheet of paper size.
I need to make it smaller,
I'm going to go to edit
and free transform
or Ctrl T,
command T on a Mac
and I can just shrink Lauren down
by dragging in a a corner handle.
If you've got different version of Photoshop to me
you may have to hold shift
as you go otherwise Lauren might
become a bit of a a weird shape
but I reckon that's probably about right.
Click on the tick
to commit to that change.
Now I could have done
with a bigger gray background.
I don't have one,
so I'm going to stretch
my background out.
I'm going to get the rectangular marquee
and just select everything above Lauren's head
being careful not to include her head
and then use edit free transform
or Command T,
Ctrl T,
I'll use that from now on,
again I have to hold shift this time
so I didn't hold it last time.
This time I do that's the joy of Photoshop
try holding shift if your image
does something weird?
Okay let's do the sides as well
using Ctrl T
and holding shift
dragging out,
it's more important that the sides
go right to the edges
than the top to be honest
with you, so I'll stretch those right out
and again hold the shift key
and out we go.
Okay there we go.
Now, oh Ctrl D,
Command D to get rid
of the selection. I nearly forgot about that.
So the next thing to do
is a bit of layer work.
Trust me there was dozens
and dozens of layers
to make this template.
I've simplified it as much as I can
but there is still a little bit
of layer work to do
and the thing I need to do
is to go up to layer
and then come down to layer mask
and hide all.
Now this seems really weird
because when you click on it,
all of that work disappears
and what we get is a black rectangle
next to the layer.
That's a layer mask
and I can bring Lauren back
in just a few areas
by getting the paintbrush tool,
making sure my brush color
is white the opposite to black
and with a big brush
and also a very, very zero hardness brush
soft brush, I can just click and paint
and bring Lauren back
through and I end up with that nice
vignetted look as well.
Now you could stop here
but I designed the template to be customizable
so there are a few things
you can change for example,
you can turn my background
texture off, that's actually the texture
from my studio wall.
You can click on the warm tone
and lose that or change
the opacity and have it much stronger
depending on your taste.
You can have a cool tone
and do the same thing
or you can click on the top layer
and change the washed out effect
and turn it off,
you can double click it
and change the bottom section here
to have a more washed out effect
whatever you'd like to do.
You can customize this
and create your very own
Festive Fine Art portrait.
Well if you've enjoyed this video,
don't forget to leave me
a comment below
and of course click
on that subscribe button.
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click on the bell icon.
I'm Gavin Hoey,
thanks for watching.