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

897 Two images are better than one

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

897 Two images are better than one

- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to "Deke's Techniques," the at home days. Now, as you may have heard, I was recently scuba diving in Antarctica when suddenly we came across a leopard seal, which if you know anything about diving in Antarctica, is exactly what you want to see. I mean, just look at this thing. These are actual photos from that actual dive, actually captured by Emmy Award winning photographer and member of the Women Diver's Hall of Fame, Becky Kagan Schott. Now, Becky is an amazingly nice person, every bit as humble as she is talented, which, of course, made me very envious, and so I vowed to create something every bit as awesome. Based on nothing more than two frames from a GoPro movie in Photoshop, what Becky captured in a few real time moments behind the lens, I mimicked in several digital hours in post. Now when I showed this to Becky, she said, "Gee whiz, Deke! "I didn't know you were evil," which is when I promised her that I would show the world what I had done in step by step detail and credit her as my inspiration. Here, let me show you exactly how it works. All right, here we are inside Photoshop looking at that leopard seal that we developed last week and here's the final version of the composition just so you have a chance to see it on screen. We're going to start things off by going up to the File menu and choosing Browse in Bridge in order to open Adobe Bridge, and then if you're working along with me, you want to go over to your Filter panel, which by default is located in the bottom left corner of the screen, then go ahead and troll open these File Type options and select JPEG File so that we're just seeing these two JPEG images right here. And I'm going to go ahead and click on this little plus sign down here at the bottom of the screen in order to zoom in on those thumbnails. Now notice the thumbnail on the left includes a little Settings icon which tells us that we've modified the image non-destructively inside Camera Raw, whereas the other image, the one that contains the little icebergs, has no icon whatsoever which tells us that it has not been developed inside Camera Raw. And so what we want to do is develop this image more or less like we developed the other one last week and you can do that by right-clicking on that thumbnail and then choosing Develop Settings followed by Copy Settings, like so, and that'll copy all the settings that you applied in Camera Raw. Now you want to right click on this image, Undersea Ice chunks.jpg, and then choose Develop Settings once again followed by Paste Settings, which is going to bring up this big dialogue box which is asking you exactly which settings you want to paste. The default options are great, by the way, so all you want to do is click OK in order to paste those settings and notice we get a very different looking image. Now I want to modify the settings ever so slightly by right-clicking on the image and choosing Open in Camera Raw where you have a keyboard shortcut of Control + R here in the PC or Command + R on the Mac. Now to my eye, the color's a little bit too murky, little bit purplish, actually, so I'm going to click in this Tint value right here and then I'm going to press Shift + Down Arrow in order to reduce the value in increments of 10 until we arrive at a tint of negative 20, which ends up turning the water green. Now I'll Shift + Tab back to the temperature value and take it down as well in order to drain some of the yellow out of the image until we achieve a temperature of plus 10, is what I came up with. All right, I'm going to go ahead and scroll down this list a little bit and I'll click inside the Highlights value. Now you can see that we have some awfully bright highlights, in fact, they're a little bit blown, so we have some areas of flat-out white, and to account for that I'll take the Highlights value down to negative 10 and then I'll drop down to this Whites value right here and I'll press and hold the Alt key, or the Option key on the Mac, and drag its triangle so that we can see the areas where we have blown highlights. So any pixels that appear white are indeed white. Anything that's black is protected. So what I want to do is get rid of as much white as possible, so I'm going to take that Whites value down to negative 100, and you can see that we're still left with some blown highlights, but not nearly as many as we had before, at which point I'll go ahead and release my mouse button and release the Alt or Option key. All right, now the rest of the settings are just fine as is, they're the same settings we applied to the leopard seal last week, including all these detail settings and these guys right here, the HSL Adjustments, including where the Hue tab is concerned an Aquas value of plus 20 and a Blues value of plus 40. The one problem I have with this image is that in addition to being crooked, as you can see, we'll take care of that in a moment, it also has some pin cushioning so that the ice is bending downward toward the middle. And we're going to take care of that by switching over to the Lens Corrections panel. Notice that Camera Raw's already aware that this is a GoPro image. I set the Model to HERO7 Black, even though I shot this image with a HERO8, and that's because this particular version of Camera Raw doesn't know about the HERO8. So HERO7 is close enough. However, I do want to take this Distortion value down and notice as I do that I get rid of some of that pin cushioning so that I'm restoring a little bit of the barrel distortion until I get a value of 24 at which point our horizon is flat. Now, it's at an angle, it's crooked, but it does describe a straight line, which is all we need at this point. So what you want to do is drop down to the Open Image button and then press the Shift key so that it switches to Open Object and click on it. And that way we will open the image as a Smart Object here inside Photoshop. And so notice in the Layers Panel we have a little page icon in the bottom right corner of the thumbnail and that tells us that we are working with an editable and indestructible Smart Object. All right, now we want to take the Smart Object and bring it into our composition in progress and so assuming that the Rectangular Marquee Tool is selected up here near the top of the Toolbox, you just want to go ahead and right-click anywhere inside the image window and choose Duplicate Layer and then change the document to Generous headroom, is the name of my file, .psd, and then I'll go ahead and click OK. And now you can just go ahead and close this image because after all you've copied it to a different file. And I'm going to go ahead and click the No button here on the PC, that'll be the Don't Save button on the Mac, in order to abandon my changes. Not to worry, they are right here inside of this file. All right, now I'm going to rename this layer ice, just to keep the layer name nice and short, and now what we want to do is rotate and scale this image. So I'm going to zoom out by pressing Control + Minus, or Command + Minus on the Mac, and then I'll go up to the Edit menu and choose Free Transform, which has a keyboard shortcut of Control + T, or Command + T on the Mac. And now anything you do in the way of scaling or rotating this layer will be applied non-destructively, because after all we're working with a Smart Object. All right, so we'll go ahead and scroll back up a little bit and now if I were to press Control + Zero, or Command + Zero on a Mac, to zoom out so that I can see the entire transformation boundary, and then move my cursor outside the boundary so it appears as a rotate cursor and drag I would now be able to straighten that layer. And I'm actually looking for a Rotate value up here in the Options bar of exactly two degrees. Seems to work out well. And now I'll Shift + Tab back to the Width value, notice the Width and Height values are linked into alignment with each other and I'm going to change that Width to 82%, by the way, and because the values are linked that'll change the Height value as well. Now I want to go ahead and flip the image, and so I'll go ahead and right-click anywhere inside the image window and then choose Flip Horizontal from the bottom of the Shortcut menu and that goes ahead and flips the image like so. It also changes out our values. So we now, for whatever reason, have a negative Height value, and instead of a Rotate value of two degrees it is now 178 degrees, which is just fine, that's what I want, but I do want to better position this layer and I'm going to position it numerically using the X and Y values. So make sure this Delta triangle is turned off and then select the X value and change it to 1480, and then Tab over to the Y value and change it to 712, and finally press the Enter key, or the Return Key on the Mac, a couple of times to invoke that change. All right, now we want to mask this image into place using a Layer Mask, and so with the ice layer selected drop down to the Add Layer Mask icon at the bottom of the Layers panel and Alt or Option click on it and that will fill the new Layer Mask with black which will temporarily hide the layer as we're seeing right here. Now you want to go ahead and select the Brush tool, which you can get by pressing the B key, then right-click inside the image window, and I'm going to go with a Size value of let's say 500 pixels, we definitely want a Hardness value of 0%, and I'll press the Enter key, or the Return key on a Mac, to accept that change. And now you want to tap the D key, D for default colors, by the way, so that the foreground color is white, which is going to allow us to paint the icebergs back into the image like so. And so you can just go ahead and drag pretty easily there, you don't have to be too careful, around these icebergs like so. And if you end up going too far, you're bringing back too much of those icebergs, especially where the dark water is concerned, then just go ahead and zoom in, in my case, notice this detail right here, we want to paint it away, so I'll tap the X key to switch the foreground and background colors so that the foreground color is now black. And then I'll press the left bracket key a few times to reduce the size of my brush cursor and I'll go ahead and paint that garbage away, like so, then I'll go ahead and paint over here as well. So you can go your own way. If you want to bring stuff back, you just press the X key and paint again in order to paint with white instead of black. And now I'll press the X key in order to paint some more with black in order to paint some of this garbage away over here. And I'll leave it at about this point, I want to get rid of that little dot that's showing up, and I might reduce the size of my cursor even more, once again, by pressing the left bracket key, and I'll go ahead and paint some of this stuff away as well. All right, now you can confirm that you've done a pretty good job by Alt or Option clicking on the Layer Mask thumbnail here inside the Layers panel, so that you can see the mask independently of the image and that will you allow you to see any points that you sort of messed up on, that is to say any areas of white that are showing up near the top of this black region right here. All right, now Alt or Option click on that thumbnail once again in order to bring back the full color image, and I'll press Control + Zero, or Command + Zero on the Mac, in order to center my zoom, and now what we want to do is colorize these icebergs just a little bit to better match the color of the water below. And we're going to do that using a Color Overlay effect, but first thing you want to do is switch back to the image thumbnail so that we can eye drop colors from the image itself, and then click on the FX icon at the bottom of the Layers panel and choose Color Overlay, and that will bring up this dialogue box right here. Now by default, the color is gray, or something like that. We want it to be blue so I'm going to click on that color swatch to bring up the Color Picker dialogue box, and now I'll move my cursor into the image window and you can see that it's now an eye dropper cursor at which point you can drag it around in order to sample colors from the image itself. Good thing we switched to the image thumbnail, because if we were still working inside the Layer Mask, even if we saw the full color image, we would be lifting whites and blacks from the Layer Mask and nothing more. Anyway, I came up with a Hue value of 195 degrees, which is making things pretty green, as you can see right here, but it's going to work out nicely. And then I'll set the Saturation and Brightness values to 100% so that we have a kind of cayenne going on, and I'll click OK. And now what you want to do is change the Blend Mode from Normal, or however it reads, to Color so that we're colorizing those icebergs. Now that's way too much, so I'm going to reduce the Opacity value to just 33% in order to produce this effect right here. And now I'll go ahead and click OK to accept that change. And there you have it, we've managed to combine a couple of frames from movies that I captured with a GoPro HERO8, and with just a little more work, we'll be able to achieve this final effect here. Now I know some of you are going to say, "Deke, my good sir, "your photographic composition is not convincing," to which I would say, "Friend, you're preaching to the choir," which is why if you're a member of LinkedIn Learning I have a follow up movie in which I show you how to bind the ice and leopard seal together with the help of a hand-drawn vignette. If you're looking forward to next week, we're going to take our leopard seal composition so far and we're going to absolutely sell it by turning it into a super smooth photographic painting. "Deke's Techniques" each and every week. Keep watching.

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