Season two of Altered Carbon comes out today so in this video, we're going to be
making a neon inspired composite using Imerge Pro. First, let's take a look at
how we shot the image itself. We're using five lights for this shoot. Two of them
are being pointed at the green screen with green morphsuits laid overtop. We
don't currently have green color gels so we improvised. This makes the green
stronger and easier to key out. Next is a warm really strong light pointed away
from the actor so that it bounces off of the white wall in the room. This diffuses
and lessens the strength of the light so that it's softer on the actor skin. Then
we have an LED on the other side which has some diffusion paper and a blue gel.
Another LED is above them as well, which is left white but still has the
diffusion. This provides some hair light to bring out those details. To take these
pictures I used a Canon 5d Mark 3 with a 24 to 105 millimeter lens. I didn't know
what the background was going to be at the time, I just lit the scene so that it
looked good and took pictures at various angles and distances. Once the shot is
taken it's time to bring it into Imerge for editing. I'm going to be showing you
some of the techniques I used as well as the effects and how I built up the layer
stack and the first image here is the streets. So this is the background this
is from Unsplash and I have a couple of filters on here to make it look the way
I want. It's important to remember when you're looking for stock photos that you
don't really have to find the perfect photo if you're looking for a background.
There are a lot of things you can do to change the color and the lighting to
bring it up to the level that you're expecting. So what I've done here is this
is the original picture, and then I have a couple of effects to change it to make
it the way I want. So this Colorize Black & White effect, for example, I
have two masks on it and you can see them on the lantern here and on the sign,
and literally, all they're doing is tinting it purple. I was looking at the
scene and I was looking at the colors that I was using and I had, you know,
orange and green and blue and I thought "A little bit of purple would look good
in there because it's meant to be sort of neon and Bladerunner type", so that's
literally all it's doing but it's just helping to bring that extra color in.
The next thing I have is a couple of blurs and the reason I'm stacking them
here is because this picture has a lot of depth you can see it's a street, it
goes on for a couple dozen feet, and technically the way depth of field works
is that if I were to just slap on a Blur to cover the whole thing, that wouldn't
be realistic. The further away something gets from the camera the more blurry it
should get. So I have this first Blur here which is a pass over the whole
thing. But then I have another one which has been masked out so it's a little bit
tighter in the frame, and what I'm doing is simulating it getting blurrier the
further on you go. Then I have one more, and that area mask is even smaller. So
the further down in the street you get the blurry or it gets and this hopefully
helps make it a bit more realistic. Moving right along to the rain, this is
actually using Imerge's Fractal Noise effect, and I, again, used multiple effects
because it's more realistic. So I'll just zoom in here so that you can see it a
bit. But basically, all I've done is chosen a type which is Wisp and then if
I play with the offset, cranking the contrast up so the white pieces of the
Fractal Noise get left behind, and then if I turn down the offset, it leaves
behind little bits. Similar to the Blur from earlier, I'll use two other Fractal
Noise effects so that it gets a little bit heavier as you go back because there
should be more rain in the scene. Then I'll just use a simple directional blur
to change them to be more streak-like. The next thing that I did was also for
realism and that is to add a Glow effect. And what I've done is I've masked out
areas around light sources in the scene. If you look at pictures of rain at night,
it gets brighter if it's around a light source. So, in order to preserve that
realism, I used a Glow effect and masked it
around the bright areas of the scene. I then used a Curves effect just to boost
it a little bit more. The other thing about rain when it passes in front of a
light is it kind of takes on the color of that light, so I used the new
Multi-Point Gradient effect, and you can see I have little dots around here so
there's one which I've colored red. Another one up here which I've left
white, one here which is pink. I've set that to overlay so the color gets
overlaid onto the fractal noise, so hopefully, the rain looks like it's
taking on the color of the light behind it. Next up we have
two pictures of smoke. This is actually the same picture but I've tinted it
different colors and rotated and scaled it so that it doesn't look exactly the
same. To color it I used a Hue Colorize effect which is really simple - you just
select the hue then you increase the saturation and the entire picture will
get tinted the color that you've selected. Then we've got Tom here you can
see the original picture so we shot against a green screen. So I didn't
really have to do a lot of work to remove the green it's just simple Chroma
Keying. You can see that effect here. Then I did a couple of color adjustments to
match the scene a bit better, so this is using the Color Adjustment effect where
you can use the eyedropper tool to select a color in your picture and then
you're able to either shift the hue or replace it completely, which is similar
to Hue Colorize. So in this case what I did was I just made the blue a little
bit less of a royal blue and more of a cyan, just to match the whole Bladerunner
aesthetic a bit more. I did a similar thing with the orange color on his skin,
I just made it a bit more saturated and I shifted the hue by one. To add in some
more emotion I added a tear. So this is actually just a white layer that I've
masked in the corners of his eyes. Then we have some foreground rain. This is the
same technique as before but I've put it in front of Tom's layer. The reason I
didn't do that from the beginning was because it becomes too much if I just
put it over everything so I wanted to separate the background rain from the
foreground rain. We shot Tom inside here in our studio, which means it's not
raining, so in order to put him in this scene I wanted it to look a bit like
he's been out in the rain - his skin and his clothes need to be a bit wet. So to
do that, what I did was I took a picture of raindrops. So that's the original
picture, and what I did was I drew a Vector Mask, which is a free-form shape,
then I changed the blend mode to Color Dodge and lowered the opacity. And that
was just a really simple way of making the texture on his jacket look like it's
been out in the rain. I did the same thing for the right side but a bit more
subtle and then for the forehead and cheeks as well, exact same thing, just a
different picture. So that's the original picture and, again, I've just masked it
out. And this time I use the blend mode Add because it's against a dark
background and using Add preserves the light areas.
Then I'll just lower the opacity so that it's a bit more subtle. Now comes my
favorite part which is stylizing it with lens dirt. So these are pictures I've
taken myself, and what I've done is I've just set the blend mode to either Add or
Screen and then masked it out if it's too much. In this case it usually is,
so I'll just mask it out so that it's only on the bottom. And I'll do this
several times with several different pictures, just to give it that atmosphere.
For a couple of them, I stretch them horizontally but not vertically. So for
example, this one here, it's got a width of 500%, 530%
but I've left the Y quite low so that's what gives it the sort of
streaky look here. Then we have a Vignette and this is not a regular
Vignette - this is a technique that I've been using recently. It's a black layer
that has been set to Overlay, then I'll draw a mask, and then lower the opacity.
And the reason is because a regular vignette just kind of overlays black on
top of the image, and if you have something that's bright around the edge,
and then you add a Vignette to it, it'll dull it down so that it's kind of an
ugly gray color. When you use overlay it preserves those highlights, and we want
to keep those, so that's why I've been using this technique instead of just a
regular Vignette. I used a Radial Gradient effect - so that's just a circle
and then I set the blend to Add. This just adds a little bit more brightness.
There's not really a technical reason I'm doing these things, it's just to
create the style and create the look that I'm going for. And finally, probably
one of the most important layers is the final Adjustment Layer. And I've got a
few effects on here, so the first is an exposure and that didn't really have a
visible effect but basically all it does is take the saturation a little bit down.
You kind of have to just eyeball it and see what looks good to you. Then I'll add
a Zoom Blur. This is masked around the outside so on the edges, it has the most
effect, and it won't have any effect in the center. But what that does is it just
hides some of the imperfections in the edges and hopefully just draws your
attention more towards the center because you don't really want
people to pay attention to this area down here. Next is a curves effect and
this is just to give it the color that I was going for. So what I did was drop the
green in the shadows and that gives it a nice magenta purplish hue, and then
raised the green in the highlights. And you can see which
part of the image that affects there. Next up is a little bit of Chromatic
Aberration, this was added not too long ago, but it's one of my favorite
effects, and basically all that does is add a sort of red and blue tinge and it
shifts the channel a bit to give it some distortion. And finally, we have a Bleach
Bypass effect which is a simple filter in itself, it just gives it a specific
look. And then some Grain to make it look a bit less CG. So hopefully you guys
enjoyed. If you have any questions feel free to leave them down below. If you're
interested in another composite like this, check the card on screen. Thanks for
watching and I'll see you all in the next video.