In this video I'll show you how you can
create the illusion of a large circus tent
in a small home studio.
Hello I'm Gavin Hoey
and you're watching AdoramaTV
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the camera store that's got everything
for us photographers.
Today you join me in my small home studio
and you might be wondering why
am I so far off the center of the frame.
Well today this is actually going to be
the middle of my studio
because I'm going to extend it double the size
in that direction.
Virtually.
I'm going to create a shoot
where it looks like somebody is waiting
in the wings of a theatre,
or in this case a circus.
Now to do that I need a couple of things.
First of all I need a curtain for them to look through,
which is this but I've only got the one.
Which is why we're going to add
the other side in Photoshop.
So this is just a piece of cotton
and we painted some red stripes
to make it look
kind of 'circusy'.
To light this curtain
I have an Evolve 200
from Flashpoint
and it is way up on my ceiling.
In fact, it's literally banging on the roof.
That is in fairly close to the fabric
so it beaming straight down
will give me interesting
down lighting and close will mean
it picks up all of the texture
from the fabric.
Now, the rest of the studio is blacked out
as much as I can.
So I've got black all the way around here
and the blacker you can make this area
the better because this is where we're going to
extend it inside Photoshop and having black
makes that process a lot easier
but we'll get to that in a little bit.
Around the back we have another light
and a smoke machine but I'll talk
about those as we go through the video.
For now what we need to do is get
a camera set and get shooting.
Well before I actually get the model in
there's one thing I need to do,
if I want my studio to look extra large
I need two sets of curtains,
except, I've only got one piece of fabric.
So what I'll do is, I'll take a picture of this
without the model
and then I'll Photoshop it
on the other side and we'll do that
at the end of the video.
So I've already metered this out for f/8.
I'm going to pull the curtain back so
it'll look different on each side and then
I'll just take a picture like that.
It's also important that when I do this
I have my camera on a tripod so when
we Photoshop these two together
that the curtains appear to be the same size
and the same angle, that will save you
a lot of time later on.
So once again I've been joined by Beth
who's going to be the model
for this shoot
and as you can see
she's all set up as a showgirl
which fits in with our circus theme.
So let's talk about the lights,
we've already seen
that we have a down light
to light the curtains
and if you get it right
then it should light a bit of Beth as well
which is a good thing.
Then we've got the background.
So out here is our stage.
To create the optical illusion of depth
I'm going to fill that area with smoke
but if I just turn the smoke machine on
you honestly wouldn't see anything,
you need to back illuminate the smoke.
So around the back
I have an Explorer 600 light
from Adorama, that's going to light the smoke.
It's quite a powerful light
but I'm going to use it
at a low power setting.
Now before I start the smoke
it's really important
you know what channel
your background light is on
because when you add smoke into the scene
well all of your settings
can go out of the window.
So be prepared to increase
or decrease the power
of that background light
once you start
taking pictures.
It's a good idea to have your remote control
and your backlight set to the same channel
ready to go.
Now, just before we fire the smoke,
it's worth saying
I am working in my small home studio
the minute we put the smoke machine on
it will start to fill the studio
and once the smoke starts coming towards
the camera it may be that we have to stop
taking pictures and clear the room of smoke.
So my little tip is to use a very small amount
of smoke to begin with and then add
as you need.
Don't go filling the room in one go because trust me
that's going to make your life a lot more difficult.
Okay so I think we're ready.
Okay let's get some smoke in the scene.
Let's get shooting.
There we go.
So we got some absolutely fabulous shots there.
The studio is now completely full of smoke.
We're going to get rid of the smoke,
go into Photoshop
and do a bit of post-processing.
We're going to do that right now.
Extending my studio and adding the second curtain
is a two-step process.
The first thing I need to do is clean up
the main image.
So let's start there.
So this is an image I want to use and it has a problem
that often happens with smoke.
Smoke acts like a reflector and a diffuser
and sometimes you light areas,
like here and here,
that you didn't really want to.
So I'm going to cover those in smoke
by using
the healing brush
right here.
Now, the healing brush is very straightforward
to use, hold the 'Alt' key
and click an area
where you want the sample
then let go of the 'Alt' key
and just paint where you want it to go.
That should create some really nice
new smoke and just cover that part quite well.
Then we'll do the same down the curtains.
Now, what I'm trying to do is
make sure there is nothing in this
shot that says 'studio'.
We're trying to make this look like a big space,
not a small space.
So anything that gives it the feeling that
this was taken in a small enclosed area
I'm going to cover in smoke.
That's great, that'll do for now.
Next thing to do then is to make the
whole thing a little bit bigger.
To do that I need to make sure
that the area I add
is black in color.
Remember we went to the trouble of
trying to make this area generally black.
So to get it black I'm going to swap my foreground
and background colors over,
just press 'D' followed by 'X'
and that's a nice keyboard shortcut
to do the same thing.
Then I'm going to jump over to the crop tool,
make sure I have nothing in the width and height
settings here,
just click the 'Clear' button
if there is
and then I'm just going to
drag out this left-hand side
and I'm going to sort of drag out
a little bit more room.
Looks good.
Then I'll just click on the tick at the top,
or press enter and that will commit to that change.
Okay so I've added in the extra space
and I've cleaned the image up.
Now I'm ready to add in the curtain
and complete the look of this shot.
So the curtain picture right back at the beginning,
there's the picture I took right at the start.
I'm going to go up to Select
and then choose All
and then I'm going to
go to Edit and choose Copy,
jump back
to my main picture by clicking it,
back to Edit again.
This time I'll choose Paste.
When I paste it in, it's clearly not right
because I still have this black area here,
in fact, the whole curtain is back to front.
So to flip that over I'm going to go back
to Edit once more,
down to Transform.
On Transform I'll come across and down
to find Flip Horizontally.
To be honest, it would've been a lot easier
if I had just moved the other side of the curtain
but there we are.
You live and learn.
Move that across, it needs to go over to the side.
It should snap in quite nicely
but I still have
this large black area here
where we blocked out.
Well we can't see Beth anymore.
So to return Beth to the picture
I'm going to come up to the Layers,
find the Blending Mode
which is currently set to Normal and choose
the Screen option instead.
So that give me both images,
the black disappears and I get the picture I want.
Now, the purpose of making the black
black right at the beginning
was for that very reason.
However, I can still see a distinct line here.
I'm going to get rid of that line which is the join
between the original picture
and the extended canvas
by using a brush.
So I'm going to get a brush and I'll make sure
my foreground color this time it is black
because that's the color I want to paint.
Over to my layers
and make sure I'm working on
the background layer.
With a big soft brush
just paint that area away.
There you go, look at that.
There we are.
With a little bit of tweaking, a bit of
vignetting and some fine-tuning there it is.
My final picture is complete.
Well, it just goes to show that even in a small
studio space like this you can still think big
and create some amazing images.
If you've enjoyed this video please leave
me a comment below and even better subscribe
for more videos from myself and the other amazing
presenters right here on AdoramaTV.
I'm Gavin Hoey, thanks for watching.