Hey, welcome to another photography tutorial thing. I'm Jason and today
we're going to revisit a video I shot six months ago for a different channel, a vlogging
channel and I've since discontinued that, but the technique in it, the photography technique in it,
is really good and I wanted to make sure it didn't get lost. I wanted to make sure it got shared with
you because it hardly got seen over there because it was a brand new channel. So I'm bringing it
back here and re-releasing it. Now it is spring and I shot that one in the fall, but I think
the techniques can apply any time of the year and basically what it is is we went and learned how to
shoot a beautiful waterfall in autumn, just back over that way, and the technique amounts to more
or less bracketed photography but we do something a little bit more to it; we manually process it.
So you could take an HDR photo with your phone or your camera and that's where it’ll take a number
of pictures at different exposures and blend them together automatically and you get a pretty good
photo. You could also do what's called bracketing photo, it's usually a setting, where it takes a
properly exposed picture, an underexposed picture, and an overexposed picture and then you have all
three of those. Then you can go into Lightroom or Photoshop and process those into an HDR
automatically using computer software. Or you can do what we're going to do today, learn how to do,
is you’re going to manually expose the proper one, you're going to manually expose the
overexposed one, and you're going to manually expose the underexposed one. It’s going to
give you three pictures. We’re going to take it back into Photoshop and instead of clicking the
auto create HDR image button we are going to manually pull out the best,
the lights, the darks, the middle tones, of all the images and turn it into something
that's absolutely stunning. So without further ado let's rewind six months to the same spot.
Today I thought I would do something kind of fun with you and we will go and photograph Stone Creek
Falls in Platte River State Park between Lincoln and Omaha just off of i-80. I was out here in
the summer. Pretty place. I thought with all the fall leaves that are going on right now, although
they look pretty green, right here, there, there's fall leaves, that it might look pretty good to
maybe have some color in the shot plus hopefully it won't be nearly as busy. When I came it was
completely full of tourists and so it was really hard to get any photos without people in them.
Here's what I brought with me. I like this bag. I'll show you in a second
why I like it. It’s because I can open it up like this without things falling out.
Anyway, I brought my Fuji X-T4. I currently have a 35 millimeter lens on there. That’s going to be,
going to give me a wider field of view. I also have in here a 50 millimeter. That's
going to be a tight shot. I probably won't use that. And a 16 millimeter that'll give me a
really wide view if I need it and then I've got a tripod connected there as well as a tripod that
you're going to live on. So yeah, if I i’m going to be out around water or someplace dirty, musty,
leaves, etc, and I don't want to have to set my bag down in the mud and dirt
I like to bring this that way when I need to change a lens I can flip it around,
pop it open, and I can reach all of my stuff without it tumbling out. That way
I never have to put anything in the dirt. Then it just flips back around
and if you want more security, I don't have it out right now, you can put a strap here
and it'll hold it, lock in place. Here you can see that strap right there and that's going to
keep it from sliding around on your back. But I think that's going to do it. So we're just going
to head back in this way and go check out those falls. It's only about a quarter of a mile hike.
*light guitar music playing*
Alright. Before I get photographing I'll give you a quick look at it. Hopefully you can hear
me. I put on a microphone. So it's pretty nice. There was a family out here taking photographs
because it's a very popular spot. I really want to get some nice, basically kind of what you're
seeing here because this is a wide angle lens you're looking at, kind of get that all in frame.
So the first thing I noticed is that I need a wider lens. The 35 just isn't going to cut it,
maybe a 23 would have done it but I'm putting on my 16. It's going to give me a really nice wide
field of view. Just for fun I'll show you what the field of view difference is. So here's with the 35
and now the 16. So quite a big difference in terms of how much you can see.
And in order to get this the way I want I'm going to probably end up taking two shots together. One
I'm going to do a long exposure. That's where you let the camera run for... you leave the shutter
open for a longer period of time and that's going to give you nice smooth white water. It's going to
allow the water to bleed through for a long time. It's probably going to overexpose everything else
so then I'm going to take another shot without moving my camera… *pop* Not only do you need
to make sure you don't move the camera but you also need to make sure you don't touch the ISO
or the f-stop, your aperture. The only thing you're allowed to touch in this technique
is the exposure. You can put on a different filter if you really want to, but the ISO needs to stay
the same. That way we have the same size grain particles and the aperture needs to stay the
same. That way you have the same depth of field. *pop* ...and I'm going to take a shot to make the
background look nice and then in post-processing I'll take the waterfall, take the background,
lump them together and it should be a really nice looking shot. So let me see if I can set up for a,
uh, the angle I want. The water is nice and chilly. So it's 6:15 at night. The sun sets at
about 6:45. I was hoping I'd get some nice golden hour light shining through here, but it's overcast
so I'm not sure how beautiful the rays are going to be, but you work with what you got.
Okay, so in that shot you can see a little bit of the water.
Just imagine you want it to look like it's pouring sand, so I think I can go a little bit longer.
Alright, nothing left to do but head back to the car and go home and edit our photos.
So I'm home now and I have the photos loaded up in Photoshop and you can see here that I actually
ended up going with three different photos and the reason for that is because I wanted to add an
underexposed image which I'll tell you about in just a moment. This first one here is the
overexposed, the light, and that was the one that we did for about 20 seconds to get that water nice
and smooth looking. Now if we turn the visibility off there you can see that the medium is properly
exposed for all the foliage, but you can see that the sky is still overblown. We're actually losing
some sticks in there and there's no color and so watch that sky here when I move to the dark image.
Again there's more leaves that show up in here plus you get some color from the sky. So by
doing an under exposure, it gives me the ability to pull even more information out.
So I'm not going to show you how to edit this entire photo but I am going to show you how to
easily blend in the lights and darks from this without much work. So the way I'm going to blend
these together is using masks. Now masks are super simple. If you've never used them in Photoshop,
you'll be able to do it in about two minutes. And a mask basically says either show things on this
layer or hide things on this layer. They're simple to create. So I've got this light layer showing
and there's a button down here called Add layer mask and if I click it, it's going to create a
mask right here. Now a white mask shows everything on this layer, a black mask hides everything on this
layer and I can actually toggle that really fast here. I've got the mask selected, always make sure
you have your mask selected. If you have your layer selected you're just going to be painting
directly on your image destroying your image, so make sure your mask is selected, and I have black
with my paint bucket and I'm going to click it. So now the entire mask is black and so everything
is hiding on this layer. So if I click it, the visibility, you can see nothing is showing because
everything's hidden. Now I just showed you an easy way to do it by using the paint bucket tool,
but you can also just create it when you click this button right here. Delete that. When you go
to click to create your mask, on a Mac if you hold option or on Windows if you hold alt and click it,
it creates the dark mask automatically. So because most of the image I want to show is this mid
layer, because most things are properly exposed, I've created a black mask on this top layer. And
now in order to get things to start showing up underneath it, we just need to start painting
the mask out. So I've switched to my paintbrush tool. I need to make sure that I'm on my mask
and I want white because I want things on this layer to start showing up as I paint. Right
now I have it set to an opacity of 100 just so you can see what happens when I start painting.
So you can see that's really sharp and bold. It's too harsh for what we want.
You can see now though that that's showing through and if I get rid of these,
that's all that's showing from this layer because that's the part that's white.
But I don't want it quite that sharp so I'm actually going to set my opacity somewhere down
here. That's going to let me paint it more carefully. And now I'm just going to slowly
paint over the white. Now again, I'm not painting on the image. I'm just painting on the mask.
So I'm just bringing out that overexposed image to show. So on my final image I spent a lot more time
carefully painting, but you can also do nice, whoop, you can also do nice things like come
in here and add some artificial highlights to the water and this is only possible because
I did not move the camera, I did not change the ISO, the fake... the noise,
I did not change the focus, and I did not change the aperture. All I changed was the
exposure which is why we can do this because we're painting out layers and if these didn't match up,
if they had a different focus, if they had different noise, they would not match up properly.
So now to bring out this dark of the sky I need to mask off this mid because it shows
whatever's below it, but because I want to show most of what is on the mid level,
I want to create a white mask. So right now that's showing everything on this layer
and so anything that I want to show as this dark I just need to paint black because that will hide
what's on this layer and allow what's below it to show through.
So I’ll come here and go to black for the paint brush, again, make sure I'm on the layer,
and we're just going to paint in anything we want to be darker. Again I was much more careful about
this in my final edit but I'm going to come here and start painting in the sky. Whoops, not there.
Start painting in that. You can see some of those leaves that were gone showing back up.
Now I spent much more time carefully doing this in my final image. This is just to give
you an idea of what's possible. And maybe you want these bushes, that's really bold,
maybe you want these bushes down here to be a little darker so they're not so distracting.
And you can just kind of jump back and forth. So now I kind of want to lighten this up
so I'm going to come back up here to the top layer. Click on that mask.
I need to switch to white because I need to show what's on this layer and I'm just
going to come in here and kind of paint some of that in to bring out some more details.
And so you can sit here and go back and forth and tweak things as much as you want. So then
when you're all done, you've painted everything the way you wanted to, you
can select all of them. Right click and duplicate layers and that's got a whole
bunch of copies made and then you right click and merge layers. I just like to do merged layer.
So now that is the equivalent of all this and then you could come in here and edit this
like you normally would any photo. So you could come in to filter and camera raw filter
and then start tweaking things around in here.
Anyway, so you can see the big difference. That allowed me to bring out a lot more of
that waterfall that I wouldn't have had had I only taken just one image. So you can just edit this
all over the place and I spent a good amount of time doing this and I'm really happy with
the results and I'm happy to share them with you. So here at the end of the video
I'm going to show you the before and the after.
Thank you for watching. If you liked this video please consider giving it a thumbs up. It's
going to help other people find the video and then go ahead and share it with your friends
if you want on Facebook or something like that, that way more people can see these vlogs because
I enjoy making them and I hope you enjoy watching. See you next time.
*soft piano music playing*