From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

895 Rescuing a frame from a GoPro movie

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

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895 Rescuing a frame from a GoPro movie

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- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques: The At Home Days. Okay first thing's first, this is what we're going to create. I call it leopard seal underwater under ice and I actually shot this, by the way, well, kind of. Do you have time for a story? No? Okay so recently, my talented wife, Colleen, and I had the rare opportunity to scuba dive in Antarctica. We traveled there on a decommissioned research vessel, called the Plancius. Now you can't just dive off the Plancius, it's several stories tall. Rather, you get into the water via rigid-hulled inflatable boats called Zodiacs. Our particular Zodiac held just a few divers and a guide, the person who drives the boat, keeps you safe and helps you out of the water. After one dive, our guide, this very kind and wildly handsome guy named Peter, learned that a leopard seal was in the water. About 10 feet long, that's my photo, leopard seals have massive teeth, that's dreamstime, and unpredictable tempers. So naturally, I grabbed the camera I had, a GoPro HERO8, and jumped in the water and I was able to get this movie. It may seem unremarkable, after all, I didn't have any special lenses or other equipment. I also turned off the camera's pre-processing, which makes for a drab movie, but that's actually what I wanted because that way I could save my favorite, albeit lifeless, frame as a JPEG file and then develop it in Camera Raw to eventually achieve this effect. Admit it, that was a great story but it's missing something. Oh, I know! Here, let me show you exactly how it works. All right so here we are inside Photoshop, looking at the final layered composition. However, I'm going to start things off in Bridge by going up to the file menu and choosing Browse in Bridge, at which point, you can see that I have a total of three image thumbnails, including the layered PSD file and these two flat JPEG images, which are frames from the single GoPro movie. And so, I'm going to start off with this guy, leopard seal hero eight dot JPEG, and I'll right click on it and choose Open in Camera Raw, in order to develop the image inside Camera Raw, like so. Now I want to start things off by correcting for lens distortion and so, I'll go ahead and switch over to this panel, Lens Corrections, right here, and then, notice that we have a couple of check boxes. I'm going to go ahead and turn both of them on. However, as this warning is telling me, Camera Raw is unaware of what camera I used to capture this photo. And that's because, as a result of the fact that I copied this frame from a movie, it has no metadata. And so, I'm going to go ahead and change the make, this option right here, to GoPro and then I'll go ahead and select the desired model. Now, what I really want to do is change it to HERO8 Black, however, HERO7 Black is the most recent version of this camera so I'll go ahead and choose it. And that will get rid of a lot of that distortion. Notice, you can compare the two, by the way. The uncorrected image right here, which has quite a bit of barrel distortion, to the corrected version of the image, which has a lot of pin cushioning. And so, rather than set the distortion value to 100, I'm going to take it down to 70, like so. All right, the image still looks terrible, however. So I'm going to switch back over to the basic panel and then I'll scroll down this list. You may be able to see all of your options at the same time but I have to scroll up and down through mine. And then I'll go ahead and grab the slider triangle associated with dehaze and I'll crank it all the way up to 100% and you can see that does a heck of a job of increasing the clarity of this sea lion. And that's because there's so much water between me and the seal, that it acts as a kind of haze. All right, now I'm going to shift tab back to clarity and I'm going to crank that guy up to, let's say, +80. And then, I'll shift tab back to texture and I'll take it up to +40. So, as you may know, clarity affects the sharpness of the low frequency details, so the big edges, whereas texture affects the medium frequency details, so the actual texture associated, for example, with this seal's fur. All right, so I'm just going to take this to 100% here by pressing control, alt, zero, that's command, option, zero on the Mac, and then I'll go ahead and scroll back up the list and I'll set the tint value so that the water's not quite so green. I'm going to go ahead and crank that guy up to +40, at which point, we have an awfully pink looking seal. And now, I'm going to get rid of some of the blue by increasing the temperature value to +40 as well. So we have a temperature of +40 as well as a tint of +40. And now, I'll go ahead and click in the contrast value there and take it up to +40, as we're seeing right here. And finally, the image is looking a little too colorful so I'll go ahead and scroll down my list, click in the vibrance value and take it down to -20. All right, now we've got a ton of noise inside this image so I'm going to switch over to the detail panel by clicking on those two cones right there and then, I'll click in the luminance value and I'll take it up quite a bit, to 70, as we're seeing right here. And that does a pretty good job of getting rid of all that noise, after which point, I'll go ahead and tab down to the color value, which affects color noise and I'll take it up quite a bit as well, to 50. All right, now I want to sharpen the remaining detail here. So I'll crank the amount value all the way up to 150, which is going to affect the high frequency detail, by the way. So again, we were affecting the low frequency detail with clarity, the medium frequency detail with texture and then finally, the high frequency detail with this sharpening amount value. Now, I don't want to bring out any of that noise so I'm going to go ahead and take the detail value down to zero. So we've got a sharpening amount value of 150, a radius of 1.0 and then both detail and masking are set to zero, at which point, I'll press control zero, or command zero on the Mac, just so that we can take in the entire image. Now, to me, it's still looking a little bit green so I'm going to switch over to this panel, HSL Adjustments right there, and I'll make sure that my hue tab is active, at which point, I'll go ahead and select the targeted adjustment tool, which has a keyboard shortcut of T for target, and then you just want to drag inside the water to the right, like so. And notice that I've changed both the aqua's and the blue's value. And so, I'm really looking for an aqua's value of +20 and a blue's value of +40 to produce this very blue looking water right here, at which point, I'm going to go ahead and open this image as a smart object by pressing this shift key and clicking on the open object button down here. And that will switch me over to Photoshop, as we're seeing right here, and it will open my leopard seal, named for the spons right there, as a non-destructive smart object. And that, my friends, is at least one way to develop a washed out frame from a GoPro movie so it looks like a halfway decent photograph using Camera Raw. I hope you like what we've come up with so far but the composition is tragic, which is why, if you remember, with LinkedIn Learning, I have an information-rich follow up movie in which we improve the composition in Photoshop, with the help of the content aware fill workspace. If you're looking forward to next week, well, it's information rich as well. That's when we're going to take a well developed sea mammal and add it to the some well developed ice to create one of the best photographic compositions you've ever seen. Deke's Techniques each and every week, keep watching.

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