(speaking in foreign language)
- In this episode,
I'm gonna show you how to take extreme photos
in extreme high dynamic range and very long shadows.
(dramatic music)
(speaking in foreign language), my name is Serge Ramelli.
I'm a French photographer from the amazing, the incredible,
the romantic city of Paris, France.
But right now I'm in Los Angeles,
and I'm in one of the most iconic place
in Los Angeles, Union Station.
Union Station, you've seen this in many movies
like Gangster Squad.
The opening scene takes here at Union Station.
And it's a great place,
because the sun is coming down here
and it's gonna light these big windows.
We have the sun shining through the windows
and creating really dramatic lighting inside of the station.
But the problem is that there's a lot of people.
How do you frame it?
How do you get rid of the people?
How do you make great photos?
Well, follow me and let's take some photos in Union Station,
and then I'm gonna show you some really cool tricks
how to make them really pop.
So come with me in Los Angeles, California, Union Station.
(bright orchestral music)
(camera shutter clicks)
Let me show you the photo in my Lightroom catalog.
Alright guys, so here I am in my Lightroom catalog
back from Union Station.
And I wanted to show you a little bit,
some of the good shots, the bad shots that I got.
First, I started off with the,
I have a 35 millimeter lens.
It's a prime lens and I started taking photos with that,
but it was, 35 was not large enough,
So I wanted to do like a pano,
because it has these big windows
and so I took like four photos
and that's the pano I got into Lightroom.
But you can see the top of the windows is missing.
So I said, you know what let's go crazy.
I put on a much bigger lens.
I think I used the 12-24.
It's a very wide lens.
And I still did a pano and that was a 20 millimeter
instead of 35, and so I took one, two, three photos.
And this time I got this which was much better.
That's the pano unretouched, okay?
So that was one of the candidate photos
that could be potentially cool.
I tried different framing.
I just love how the light was coming through the window.
You couldn't really see the sun rays.
And I'm gonna cheat and add the sun raising in Photoshop,
but you could almost see them,
some of the profile.
You could see them, but I would have to blow smoke
to really see it.
That's what they do in movies.
They add a lot of smoke, because the sun rays
were coming through like crazy.
So that's some of the framing.
I was trying to play around
with just that window and that window.
And in the end, I didn't really like it.
Also, that sort of framing that I did
is a little more frame,
but there was a flow of people coming all the time.
So I said, you know what?
I'm gonna take a whole bunch of photos with the same framing
and use the technique.
You can see the description in this video.
I have a technique when you have a lot of tourists
where you take the same photo over and over
and then in Photoshop,
you do some magic and they get erased.
But after doing that for awhile,
I realized that it was not really needed,
because all of a sudden there was nobody.
Nobody came so I could get the shot with no one.
So I kind of like that.
It was kind of like one of my best photos
and then what I did was I turned this photo into that.
And I'm gonna show you how I do that.
So now's the framing that I even like even more
which is the one that I'm gonna show you is this one.
I like that framing, because of this.
We can really see the light coming through
and that bright light of spotlight there.
And then another framing that I tried
that I kind of like is, is, is,
this framing, but at the end of the day
it was too much people,
it was too noisy, I didn't like it so much.
So I ended up also doing this.
So that's one of, and I think this one
would work really good on Instagram.
You can see there's a lot of.
I added a lot of dust and all that stuff.
So now, how do you do that?
Well, I'm gonna show it to you on?
Let me see here,
I did a little selection on this one.
So that's the raw file unretouched,
and what I usually do is I do a bit
of retouching first.
I mean, look at this.
When you open up the shadow, look how much details
you're gonna get, but I really
wanted to make a super high dynamic range photo.
I mean a very contrasted photo.
So on this one,
I did not bring the shadows too much completely at 100.
And something in the highlights,
I made the highlights even bigger.
And then I do my black point using the black key.
The black and using the option key.
So I really want a strong black point
And what you see here in yellow and red is information
which is 100% black.
And then the white point,
I want the white point,
I want it to be really overexposed.
So that was kind of cool.
The whole photo was a little too warm
so I added I think a little bit of blue.
Yeah, just a little bit of blue and a little bit of magenta.
I like the color better,
but now we have a bit of an issue with the distortion.
So I'm going to go in lens correction.
So sometimes lens correction is not gonna do a good job.
Look at that.
Lens correction sometimes opens up too much.
While, in this case, it didn't do.
I can undo.
Yeah, look at this.
It just makes the whole photo too bright.
So I'm not gonna do the profile correction
'cause I'm going for a specific look.
I want a sort of a dark look with some lights coming up.
And I'm gonna go to the transform
and just click on auto.
And in any case, I'm gonna give you all these photos
and you can retouch them how you want.
And you can even post them on social media
as long as you credit me as the photographer.
My hashtag is @Photoserge so feel free to use them.
You have the link below.
I'm giving you the photos.
I'm gonna give you everything for free,
so you can play around with them.
Okay, so now once I got that then I'm gonna go to Photoshop.
I'm gonna show you two techniques.
One that's super easy to use and that's if you have Luminar.
I love Luminar for doing sun rays.
It's really the best,
'cause it's just so fast and so easy to use.
And I'm gonna show you another technique
if you don't have Luminar.
If you don't have Luminar, you can always purchase it.
Actually, I have a $10 discount if you go through the link
that I'm gonna put through the video,
but I don't want this video
to be about you buying something.
I want it to you about creating art.
So I'm gonna show you a free way of doing it.
First, let me show you the Luminar way.
So, here I am in Photoshop.
I'm gonna create a new layer.
And then I'm gonna go to filter,
Skylam Software, Luminar.
Luminar, Luminar, Luminar.
So here we are in Luminar.
And all I'm gonna do is,
I'm just gonna go to,
I'm gonna clear the workspace,
so here I'm just gonna clear workspace with nothing there.
I'm gonna go add filter
and I'm gonna go to the famous sun ray filter.
I love this filter and check this out.
So here you have an x and y,
and the thing that's amazing about the filter
it automatically does the job for you.
So you just have to, all I'm doing is just moving the x
so that it's positioned right and in the way you want it.
You have to try to make it match how the light,
I mean the light was very low
and that's kind of cool.
So you certainly can play around with the rest of this file.
I can make it a little stronger.
Something like this.
I really wanted it to be about the sun rays.
You see, I don't like that the sun ray comes here.
That's very unnatural, but we can correct that later.
So, let's see here.
Look is gonna make this stronger
or actually you want to have like a very strong look.
A very contrasted look.
That's a number of rays in this case.
There is some problems here, but we'll correct that later.
Radius.
The radius, in this case, isn't too much.
That's the radius of the sun there.
The glow radius I'm not gonna touch.
The glow amount, let's see here, glow amount.
That doesn't really matter,
'cause it's already blown away there.
The only one that's gonna really matter is penetration.
On this one, you see you can go crazy.
But I'm gonna go something like this.
The problems that we have like some on.
This is not natural and this is not natural,
but every filter in Luminar has a brush.
You can go to brush and you can click on erase.
And I'm just gonna erase this one here.
Okay.
And I'm gonna erase this one here.
I only want it to come out from there.
But you see the automask it does everything for you
which is kind of cool.
And voila!
So I'm gonna apply this
and it's gonna bring it back into Photoshop
and that's the Luminar version.
See it's like three clicks and you get amazing light rays.
And Luminar does so much more things.
I mean, Luminar is Lightroom plus a lot more.
So, it's a great solution for people
who don't want to pay a subscription to Lightroom
and they want to be able to still do some good work
and Luminar is amazing for that.
Plus, they are coming out in a few months
with Digital Asset Management.
Like a whole catalog thing, which I've tested.
It's gonna be a Lightroom killer.
I'll tell you that.
I don't think I'll drop using Lightroom,
because I love Lightroom,
but I'm probably gonna play around with both.
So that's the Luminar version.
And now I'm just gonna duplicate another copy of this,
of the original without the sun rays and I'm gonna show you.
So, I'm here in my library
and I've got a whole bunch of things in library
and one of them is light rays.
I'm actually gonna give you a couple of these light rays,
'cause I've got whole light ray professional pack
that costs almost nothing.
The link is below the video.
But, again, I want to give you everything for free
in this video.
So, I'm gonna go for, for example, these ones.
Okay?
So the way it works is that,
the good thing about the sun rays
is that they have dust in them which Luminar doesn't have.
So, here you are.
All you have to do is put it into screen mode.
Screen mode is a mode in Photoshop
that turns anything black transparent.
Check this out.
Are you ready?
One, two, three.
Boom!
And now we get sun rays and I can just,
because I'm in command T mode of the edit mode,
I can just position it exactly how I want it.
And make it all about the right position.
The problem is that it's less strong
than what I did with Luminar, but that's fine.
All you have to do is press Cmd + J
on your keyboard and boom.
You've doubled the exposure.
You can even hit Cmd + J again and make it three times.
But I think that's a little too much,
so Cmd + Z to undo.
And then, maybe you want to make a little variation
so I can add this one here.
I'm gonna give you a couple for free you can use
to make like a little starlight effect there.
So I'm gonna go there and then put it into screen mode.
Boom!
Like a little starlight effect.
And I don't like what this does there, so same idea.
You can press enter to make it go there
and then create a little mask.
B for brush,
hold on the control and Alt + Q on your keyboard
to make your brush bigger or smaller, left to right,
and top to bottom, smooth some out.
So, I want a very smooth, about this size,
and I'm just gonna,
so black is my warm color.
100% opacity.
I'm gonna mask white reveal, black conceals.
So I'm just gonna erase that and erase that.
Just wanted some variation in it.
And maybe let's add a third one.
I have one that's crazy, I'm gonna give you,
that has a lot of dust in it.
Look at that.
This one.
I used it a lot for this type of photo.
And something here, I'm gonna put it into screen mode.
Boom, boom, boom.
And, again, I'm not only giving you for free the raw files,
but you're also get all this sun effect.
All of that and then you can move it around.
Make it bigger.
It's just, this is kind of cool because,
nah, this is too strong.
The dust is too visible on this one.
So if you're not happy, you know what?
You could just delete it.
Let me see what else, which one I could?
Maybe this one seems to be kind of cool.
This one is kind of cool.
Same thing here.
I'm gonna put it into screen mode, rotate it.
I'm just trying to have a bit of variation into it.
Rotate it.
You add too much rotation,
it's gonna to be some harder to see the axis.
Yes, something like that.
And, again, I don't like that it's going,
I want it to match the shadows,
so remember I put a mask.
I have a black.
I have a black thing here.
Hold on, is this coming from,
if you wanted to see what this is doing.
Oh no, it's from an earlier one.
I didn't see that going, but this one,
yeah, this one is kind of spilling over too much.
Again, I can add a mask on this one
and you could even alt and drag the mask
'cause I need a copy so that it's only there.
Okay, so yeah.
It's a little more, it takes more time,
but, again, I'm gonna give this to you.
So I'm gonna select all that, press Cmd + G
or Ctrl + G to put it into a group.
I'm gonna call it sun rays.
I would spend more time on it, but you get the idea.
And so that's with Luminar.
Pretty cool.
And that's with Photoshop.
Pretty cool.
So, okay I want to correct the sun rays a little bit more.
So, now that I've grouped them into group,
I can go there and erase whatever that is there
to make it, 'cause all the sun rays
are blended together or not.
You can press X and bring this back maybe a little bit.
And let's say I wanted to make this more yellow,
so I can try going to the,
I'm going to go to the photo filter.
Photo filter.
Press the option key.
Go between the photo filter and the sun ray group
and click here, so that's only gonna influence the sun rays.
You can see here, I can make my,
I can make this a little more yellow.
That yellow is kind of orange,
so I can go here and make it a little more yellowish maybe.
A little brighter.
Voila.
So now, I've got yellow sunrise.
So that's the Photoshop version which I really like
and that's the Skylam, sorry.
The Luminar Skylam version which I like a lot, too.
I think I'm gonna keep this one.
I'm just gonna press save.
In any case, I'm giving you the raw files.
I'm giving you sun rays.
It's all there and at the end of the day,
what I got, let me show you.
So I tried that.
That was kind of cool.
I tried this one that we did together.
And then this is another version of it.
And I tried this one.
Alright guys, don't forget to download these source files.
All you have to do is sign up to my newsletter to get that.
You can get all the source files, all these photos,
all the sun rays.
If you want to get Luminar,
you can get 10 euros off by clicking the link below
and I will see you in another video,
also don't forget if you can like this video,
that really helps.
And if you did not subscribe to my YouTube channel,
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Click the little bell so you get a notification
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Okay, see you in another video.
(speaking in foreign language)