In this video I show you how to make a
wintry snow scene in a small home studio.
Hello, I'm Gavin Hoey and you are watching
AdoramaTV, brought to you by Adorama the
camera store that's got everything for us
photographers, and today you join me in
my small home studio, it's nice and warm,
it's nice and dry in here, which is lucky
because outside it's freezing cold and
wintry. However I still want to do a
winter themed shoot, and that's what I'm
going to do by using a few photoshop
tricks, and a few props as well, so the
first prop I'm going to use is actual
snow, will not real snow, artificial snow,
it comes in cans, it comes in powder, in
fact you don't even need snow, check
out the photoshop bit at the end and you'll
find out why! The other prop is going
to be a lantern for our model to hold
and illuminate the dark winters night,
But I'm not actually going to light the lantern
again check out the photoshop bit to
see how that's going to work, and the
reason I'm not lighting it is, it doesn't
work, it's got massive holes in the bottom,
would be rather dangerous to actually
light. Right, okay, that's what we're going
to use, let's get this cleared out, lets
get a model in, and let's get shooting.
So today I've been joined in the
studio by Kerry, who's going to be the
model for this shoot, and as you can see,
she's all wrapped up for winter, which is
really lucky, because it's going to start
snowing in a minute, which will be fun,
but before we get to the snow, we need to
sort out the lights.
So, let me talk you through the basic
setup here, and it is quite basic and
straightforward.
I've got a gray background, I could do
this with a black background, but I think
gray looks rather nice, and I've got a
key light. Now, I'm just using speedlights
for this - it doesn't need a lot of power
because the light is really close and
it's going through a glow soft box. It's about
a 70 cm, so a fairly small soft box.
Let's just take a picture like that, and
see how this looks.
First of all so Kerry are you ready? Here
we go, and looks great. It's got a lovely
softness to the light, the background is
there, but it's not too overpowering. In
fact to a degree Kerry is slightly
blending in with the background, so to
help separate Kerry out from the
background, I'm going to add a second
light, and this is just a second
speed light. This time it's turned down
very low in power,
it's zoomed in and it should just hit
the back of her head, that edge of her
shoulder, and give a little bit of light
on this side to separate out from the
darker background. So let's take a
picture like this, see how that looks.
Here we go, so there we are, we've got the
same lighting on Kerry's face, the only
difference is that light on the edge of
the hat, the edge of that shoulder, and it
is just helping to separate from the
background. Now it's not something you
absolutely have to do, but i do think it
adds that nice little edge to the
picture. Of course to make this really
come alive, we're going to add some props,
and the prop is just going to be our
lantern that we've got for Kerry to hold,
there we go I'll give you that.
Let's put that into the picture and see
how this works,
that's great one more, and it's really
important if you're adding a prop in,
especially if it's being held further
away from your subject, that you check the
lighting, and best to find out if there's
any problems before we do the snow, so
for the snow, I'm going to be using this,
which is the theatrical stage snow, really
it's a little bit like shaving foam, but
it comes out of this nice little nozzle
and this stuff is brilliant, but I can't
do it on my own! I do need some help
because I'd like the snow to come in
from behind, really don't want to spray
this in Kerry's face, that would be a
very bad idea.
So I'm going to hand this over to my
assistant Sam, who's going to be doing
the spraying. I'm going to be doing the
photography,
Let's set everything up, and we're ready
to go. We'll start spraying some snow.
OK Kerry, are you ready? Right, let's get
those lights sorted.
That's really good, and you might be
thinking I'm just going to take the
pictures whilst the snow is coming down,
but I've got a little photoshop trick to
apply to create some more falling snow,
So, I'm going to take them both when the
snows coming in, and after it's gone, so
well.. let's do some more snow. It's okay
are you ready?
And that works really well, very effective as snow.
Actually on Kerry looks tremendous, very
hard to fake that in photoshop, so let's
see if we can adjust all this slightly, and
create another look.
So for the second set up I'm using
exactly the same lights. I'm still using
a speedlight in a small soft box, we got
Kerry turn 90 degrees to the side, so
this will be a profile shot, but I've
changed the background. We had a great
background before, which looked really
good, but this time I've swapped it to
black, and the reason is all about the
positioning of the lights. Now working in
a small home studio space is at a
premium, and that means we are working
quite close to the background. If I have a
light here...
the light is very close to the
background, so if this was a gray
background,
this will all be almost white on the
illumination, but it'd be correctly
exposed when it hits Kerry. So with a
black background,
it won't go white it'll go gray and will
be almost black by the time it hits the
back of Kerry. So it's simply a matter
of choosing the right background for the
right lighting situation. So that's great,
let's take a shot like this, I metered this out
already, and see how it looks..
Kerry, are you ready. OK, here we go, that
looks really good, I like the lighting on
Kerry's face. I like the light on the
lantern, but if the lantern was actually
lit, then the backside of the lantern is
in shade, and that of course is just
down to the lighting we've got here, so to
add a bit of light onto the back of
the lantern. I'm going to use the second
speed light, now this time I've got the
speedlight zoomed in as much as it'll go,
to try and make sure that we only hit
the lantern. I don't want this to light
the side of Kerry this time, and that
means I need to get my position
absolutely perfect.
So Kerry, can I get you to hold that out as you
were before.
I'm going to bring my speedlight round to
the side like that,
let's take a test picture like that, see
how it looks. So that looks really good,
Everything's in position, the only thing
we need now is a little bit of snow,
You ready?
That's heavier than it looks isn't it? Huh?
OK, so we've got some really good shots there,
at all we need to do is get one of these
into Photoshop, and do a quick edit, we're
going to do that right now. There's really
3 things I need to do to complete
the image. I need to make whole thing
feel colder, I need to light the lantern
and make it snow of course and I'm going to
use either Photoshop or Camera Raw to do
that. Let's have a little look at this
image, this is the one I want to edit, and
the first thing to do is to make it
colder I think, and I can make it colder
here in Adobe Camera Raw or Lightroom of
course, same in Lightroom, by
changing the temperature. So if I reduce
the temperature down into the, the low
4 thousands, that adds a cold feel.
That's pretty good.
Next is going to be the, the lantern here,
and lighting the lantern is a matter of
using the adjustment brush, so if I
select the adjustment brush, and I'm
going to make sure that the exposure and
nothing but exposure is changed in this
case Maximum + four stops extra
exposure. Then I'll come down and make
sure the brush is really small, so just a
single figure sized brush, and we'll kind
of pop it around about there somewhere,
and with one-click, that should put a small
hot spot on the lantern. But it doesn't
really quite look lit. So to
complete that effect, let's come back
and choose new, for our brush, and
actually I need a bigger brush, let's make
that brush size larger. And I can come
back over here, and just click again, just
somewhere slightly different, similar
place but slightly different,
ooh, that's quite a bit brighter, now
that might be a bit too bright, but it's
definitely a bit too cold. So I can
change the temperature just for that
second click, by adjusting the
temperature slider. So will increase that
to it's maximum warmth, and we'll just
pull the exposure down a little bit, just
so it's not competing with the face
quite so much. Right, I'm happy with that,
let's open up the image, so we've made it
colder,
I've lit the lantern, next thing to do is
to add the falling snow. Now, we could do
this by hand, but there's a really handy
Photoshop action, for creating falling
snow, and I know it's really good, because
well I made it...
It's on my website GAVTRAIN.com - head
over there, type in the word snow in the
search bar, download the action. Install
it into Photoshop, however you want to do
that, and you're good to go.
All you need to do, is go to your actions
panel, find the snow action, click on the
play button, and it will play it through.
Now it works reasonably quickly,
Depending on the speed of your computer.
It will make a new image, with three layers
of different sized snow, and it completes
it like that. If you want to finish this
off of course, you might think about
going to layer, coming right down to
flatten image, and then I can take the
flattened version of that into camera
raw filter, and go for the radial filter
and we'll just put a bit of a vignette
in here - just a sort of dark on the
outside. I know haven't got it on darkened,
will adjust the exposure and reset the
color of course, there we go.
Lovely, and that has a nice little
lighting effect that works really well
with that snow scene, and with a bit more
fine-tuning and adjusting... there it is!
There's my final picture, completed.
It's amazing how just changing a few
simple things in your photograph,
completely changes the look and feel of
the image. Of course, if you want to see
more videos like this from myself, and the
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I'm Gavin Hoey thanks for watching.