In this video
I'll show you how to turn fifty almost identical pictures
into a work of art. Adorama TV presents
Take and Make Great Photography with Gavin Hoey.
Where you'll learn how to take stunning photos and in polish them
in post-production. Hello I’m Gavin Hoey and your watching
Adorama TV. Brought to you by Adorama, the camera store that has
everything us photographers. Today you join me down on the beach, where we're
gonna do
a photography shoot with a bit of a difference. Now if you like your
photography to be
arty, to be a little bit more than straight photography
I've got a really simple, really brilliant tutorial for you,
and involves taking pictures, lots of very similar pictures,
and then we can use Photoshop to bring them together and have a beautiful painting
effect
at the end. Now to achieve this I've got a couple things.
I've got a a lovely beach, which is handy. I've got my model down there who is
holding a red umbrella,
and a beautiful blue sky. You can see there's been a little bit of planning
involved with this.
And all I’m gonna do is just take a picture and then I'm gonna repeat the picture
over and over again but each time it will be ever so slightly different
as we walk our way along the beach. So that's the theory,
the shooting part of things doesn't get simpler than this.
Now as far as photography goes I wanna make sure that everything changes
slightly. So we're gonna walk along the beach
except my model, and that means I'm gonna try and keep her exactly the same
distance and
the same pose as much as I possibly can
shot to shot to shot, and we're gonna do this a lot of times.
Okay so lets take the first picture and get going. Okay so here we go. A little bit
breezy.
But what I'm gonna do this I'm gonna frame-up my shot
by looking through the viewfinder and trying to pick out the middle of the
umbrella.
I'm gonna put it over one of my little focus points
and every picture it'll be in that position. That helps me to get
consistency.
Okay so let’s just find my position.
Okay here we go, take the picture. Brilliant.
Okay so that gives me one shot. Now all I need to do is move along the beach a
little bit further. So Freya do you want to take a couple of steps to your right.
And again. Brilliant, and that’s it I’m gonna take another picture.
Ok so frame it up as close to exactly the same as before.
Take the shot. Now we’re gonna do this again and again and again. So Freya take another
few steps across.
Brilliant and here we go again.
Same shot, same positioning.
Now you might think all these gonna look the same but when they join together
there will be small differences,
small nuances in the the gravel, the pebbles here, the
the sky. Everything will be slightly different and that will work
as a beautiful arty picture. How many picture’s should you take?
Well simply the more the better. A hundred would be good.
I might be asking a bit much, 10 as an absolute minimum.
20 would be better, 50 would be ideal, but basically the more you take
the better this will look. So let's keep taking some pictures.
okay Freya take a couple of steps across. Ok and here we go.
And again. Brilliant.
And again, and again.
and again. Okay,
so I'm gonna keep doing this for the next few minutes just to get as many of
these we can,
and then we'll bring them into Photoshop and we’ll bring and all together as one
single image.
You don't have to watch me do this repeatedly cuz we gonna go into
Photoshop
right now. Surprisingly the photography was
actually quite quick. Once we got into a rhythm we took all 50 pictures,
actually we took about 60 pictures in just a few minutes.
Fortunately the Photoshop bit is equally as simple.
So let's jump into Photoshop and see how to join 50 images together
into one picture. So first of all I’m working in Photoshop CC.
Although you can do this in older versions of Photoshop as well. I'm going to
use a very neat trick that Photoshop has hidden away,
under file, scripts and load files
into stack. I've already gone through and I've sorted through the 50 images
from that image sequence. So I’ll go to browse,
and I’ll go find them. Here they are. Click on the first one
and then press Control ‘A’ or Command ‘A' on a Mac.
So they all become selected and then I hit OK.
Now that will load all 50 images into the load layers interface.
It just takes a second or two and there we go.
Now I'm not gonna put a tick in automatically aligned source images
and I'm not going to tick smart objects basically I’m going to click OK.
So what Photoshop now does is it goes and gets those fifty raw files,
applies any raw settings that I may have added and opens them in Photoshop
putting each one on it’s own separate layer. Now think about it, if I had to do this by
hand.
Open, copy you know paste,
go back and repeat. It would take me forever to do and it's got 50 images to
do.
Don't be surprised that even Photoshop working flat-out
will take a couple minutes to apply all 50 layers
as layers. Now one thing you can do at this point
is a sit back and try not to spill your coffee.
Have a nice cup of tea you'll find that much more relaxing
and join me in just a second. Don't forget to check out Adorama's latest contest
and your chance to win amazing prizes.
Okay there we go that's it, done. Actually that didn't take long at all. just
a couple of minutes, I haven’t even finished
my tea. But the next bit in Photoshop is really straightforward
let's have a look. So we've done the hardest part really, we've got all
individual picture's as layers and they all look basically the same, but as I flick
through them
can you see that each one is just a little bit different? There's just an air of randomness to
each and every shot,
and that's really what makes this techniques so successful.
What I'm gonna do is get right down to the very bottom of my layers
click on the very bottom layer and then make a brand-new layer.
layer, new layer, click OK.
And on that layer I'm gonna fill it with black using edit,
and fill, and from the contents i’ll make sure that black is selected,
and click OK. Now it won’t actually be the bottom layer it will be one up, so we’ll just drag that
down, right to the bottom.
Like so. Now that's an important step don't miss it out.
Then we're gonna click on the layer above, scoot right back up to the top,
hold the shift key and click on the top layer so they all become selected.
Now all I need to do is just drop the opacity so that each layer forms just a
small part
of the whole picture. Now there are fifty layer’s that make up my picture.
Now you might a bit of math. 100 percent divided by fifty layers.
2% per layer, not quite that simple.
I wish that it was. But instead what we're gonna do is we’re gonna get the opacity
slider and we’re just gonna bring it down and down and down and as I do
you'll see that the
individual pictures start to merge and combine.
And as I go lower and lower it becomes more and more painterly.
If I go too low it starts to get quite dark
and we lose a lot of the detail. So too low is not a good idea
let's just bring it back up. I reckon a eight-percent look about right.
Once you’ve got it good just go to layer and choose to flatten the image,
and then just to bring back a little bit of brightness and a little bit of detail
let's go to image, adjustments, brightness and contrast.
And I’ll just put a little bit more brightness and a little bit more contrast into the shot.
Just like so. Click OK and there you go.
There's my image completed with all it’s glorious
individuality with a super painterly effect.
So there we go that's a really simple technique and it'll work on
anything that has a really obvious pattern like, people
bicycles, shapes that are familiar and obvious to you.
Now if you've enjoy this tutorial and you wanna see more amazing videos
from me and the other presenters here on Adorama TV, then all you've got to do is
click on the subscribe button.
Right there. I'm Gavin Hoey,
thanks for watching.
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