- Hello and welcome.
My name is Ben Brownlee from Boris FX.
And in this quick Optics tutorial,
we're gonna be taking a focus on the light filter.
and I'll be showing you how we can create soft dappled looks
or at a simple or more complex gobo effect to your shots.
(upbeat music)
The light filter is found in the light category.
And if we apply this effect to our image here,
we can start to see what it's doing.
So at it's default,
it's creating a soft light gobo effect.
And if we take a look at the presets,
we can choose which of the many different shapes
we can use or we might want to use on a particular image.
And if I go up to the top here,
we can sort these out by an abstract or certain doors,
windows, textures, or things like foliage,
for casting a nice dappled shadow or shade
across your image.
And I'm gonna come up here and search water.
I'll use one of the caustics ones here.
In fact I use water droplets
so we can see this quite nice and clearly.
So once we've chosen our shape in the presets,
I'm gonna come into the parameters tab
and we can start to work with some of our parameters.
Now the most useful ones that we're gonna use
are going to be things like
how we're blending these together,
using the add mode, screen blend mode, or subtract.
Here I'll keep this add, we can change the brightness,
to get a more pronounced effect,
and we can even use displacement to displace our light
around or across out image.
So now if I move this along here,
you can see like it's following along
the contours of her face.
Displacement is really useful for getting more natural
looking effects.
We can also blur this up as well.
Get a more soft, subtle look.
I'll keep that shading at default, just to reset that there.
And I'm gonna skip over shadow and gobo
and come straight down to transform
because this is the other one that we're
gonna be using quite a lot.
So I can scale everything up.
If I don't want to scale horizontally and vertically the
same, I can turn off gang.
And now I have controls over how I scale those individually.
Let's take a look at the before and the after.
So let's use light now to create a bit of drama.
So as before, I'm gonna find the right preset for myself,
and I'm gonna come to something a bit ornate.
Ornate 3 I like the look of that,
and let's come into parameters and let us change the
brightness up a little bit and change the blur down
so it's a bit sharper so we can see this a bit clearer.
Now in the view, you've seen me move this around,
just using the center point.
And in the previous shot we the transform
to scale things up and down,
but we have even finer controls available to us.
If you take a look at the four corners here,
I can use these four corners as corner pins
to distort the image in how I want it to be
so maybe let's bring these both over here,
let's get a nice dramatic looking image.
I'm holding down the space bar so I can pan around
a little bit here and let's get that over somewhere there.
And once I've got my distortion into place,
I can still come in and just use the center point
to move it around where I want it to go,
or scale it up and down as necessary.
I'm gonna take the blur all the way down to zero,
because I want to show you some of the other controls.
And it's a bit easier to see when everything's
nice and clear.
Now we can colorize our gobo either using some of the
drop-downs here with our Lee filter coated gels,
so that there, or of course I can choose my color
just by sampling it here.
I'll undo that, and that brings us down
to the shadow controls.
So up til now we've been using the brightness
to change how the image starts to look.
Now if I come to shadow and start bringing that up,
that starts to make the rest of the image a little bit
darker, making our light gobo a bit more pronounced.
When it comes to blending the gobo,
we can come into the gobo controls.
We can choose a custom image from my gobo by clicking on
browse or change how the blending mode works with this gobo.
So if I set this to something like multiply instead,
or darken or add,
we're getting a different look to the image.
So by changing the blend mode,
we're not just blending in the gobo back over the top,
we're also using some of the image
and blending that back in as well.
And that's being affected by the matte
that's just opened up down at the bottom.
So we look at the view,
we can check out what the gobo looks like.
We can check out what the matte looks like,
and we can choose to base this on the highlights
or the shadows, bringing that in there.
And we have the channel key available
that you might be familiar with,
if you've worked with the selection mask,
it's the same basic idea.
Let's look at the output on this one.
And we come back into the gobo controls,
I can change the opacity of how that's
mixing back and forward,
and I can also change the blur on the gobo here.
So check out the difference between
blur up at the top with the light,
that blurs my light outwards.
So a seven point blur gives us that effect.
We're gonna take a snapshot of it,
and let's see what a seven point blur does on the gobo.
Lets compare the two,
let's bringing the blur on the gobo up a little bit more,
We can see that's just softening the shadows
while it's keeping our edges a bit sharper,
and I really liked this effect.
And I'll tweak up just a couple of the parameters here.
Add a quick spot mask to add a bit of fall off to it.
And let's check out the quick before and after,
I think that's adding a bit of drama to the shot,
I like that.
Let's finish off with one more shot,
and show you how we can blend multiple versions
of the light effect together.
I'm gonna come down and search to find some stripes.
And here we go, shutters 11.
That's looking quite nice. So let's come in,
let's position this actually somewhere in the middle
and we'll come down and we'll scale this up a little bit.
And we'll scale the vertical so we're getting
a lot of hard strokes there, go and we'll turn
our blur down, I'll probably put that just to one for now
and change displacement up.
So we're displacing around the face or across the face.
And with that displacement, I probably want to
tap the blur up just a little bit more as well,
and bring the brightness down.
So we're getting a slightly more subtle effect.
So we've got the light strikes bending round the contours of
our model here, but unfortunately the displacement,
because of the way it works is also displacing around the
background as well.
And I don't like that, I don't want that.
So what I'm gonna do is create a mask just on our girl
and probably the easiest one for this one to do is using our
easy mask because we have nice fine hair details.
If you want to learn more about easy mask,
then check out our main, easy mask tutorial,
but it breaks down to basically defining what the foreground
is, defining what the background is,
and then letting easy mask do the hard work for us.
So now I've got the light just going over our model here,
I'm going to create a new layer and I'm gonna drag my
light up to duplicate it, I'm gonna drag my mask up
to duplicate that.
And I'm just gonna come in,
select the mask and invert that.
So now I can come back into the main effect,
come into my parameters and turn that displacement off.
Turn that back down to zero.
So now I've got straight lines on the background
and I've got displaced lines going over our girl.
And I can even rename these effects,
light background and light model.
So now I have complete control over these separately,
and I can come in and maybe
add a little bit more brightness at the background,
possibly blur the background up a little bit more
just to make that sit back a little bit
and give a little bit more focus to our main subject.
Then if I select the edit button,
I can now come in and change the editing or edit how
I'm working with our light, just on the main model.
So I could play around with this a little bit more,
but I think you get the idea
and we have a look at the before and after,
before, after, before and after.
Now obviously that's just a brief look at what you can start
to create with the light effect.
Like all of the Optics filters,
This is a great one to start just playing around with
working with the presets, to see what you can do,
and then just fine tuning the effect in the parameters.
So that fits your image exactly how you want it to.
Thanks for now. My name is Ben Brownlee from Boris FX,
and I'll see you again in another Optics tutorial soon.
Thanks for watching to learn more about Optics
and to download a free trial.
Then head on over to borisfx.com.
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