Green Screen Double Step

Here's a quick tip on using a 2 step process to create a Layer Mask for an image shot against a Green Screen using Photoshop's Refine Mask tool along with the History Brush.

In this process we'll combine a mask that works great on one part of the image with another mask that works better for another part creating a better overall mask.

Check Your Masks

Often when making Layer Masks with selections created by using tools such as Channel Pulls, Color Range, or even the Magic Wand holes can be left behind that can cause problems in your image.

Here's a quick tutorial discussing a technique I use to make sure my Layer Masks are clean.

Subaru with John Marian

Here's a shot I just finished working on with long time car photographer John Marian. This was one of two shots I worked on for John that had to be turned around on a very short deadline as his client's agency, The Designory in Long Beach, had several media buys already planned out for these shots.

Aside from the short deadlines the challenge in working on shots like this is blending so many parts of the car together. Typically shots like this are built from several frames that highlight certain areas of the car. For instance the front grill might have 2 frames so we can bring in just the right highlights while retaining the subtle shadow detail. Or the headlights might need a few different exposures to build up just the right amount of "life" in the highlights without losing the definition of the various facets. Or the wheels might have one exposure for the tread and another that shows off the chrome of the wheel.

Below is another shot from this same project, this one featuring the Blue version of the car.

Digital Compositing Secrets Workshop

Upcoming APA-LA Events Photography Workshops

Digital Compositing Secrets with Dennis Dunbar

 ©Colin McGuire
Digital Compositing Secrets with Dennis Dunbar

The goal when digital retouching is to create an image so seamless that no one notices the magic that happens: the head swap, background switch or the way the lighting of the image has been changed from a cloudy day into a sunny one. Digital altering of an image that doesn’t look retouched is the ultimate challenge and this event is a must-attend for any photographer or retoucher that is looking to up their game.
On Saturday Nov 3rd Dennis Dunbar will share with us many of the techniques he uses to make complex composite images from movie posters to lifestyle and product shots. Along the way you’ll learn techniques, shortcuts and tricks that can be applied to your workflow.
 
Whether it’s combining many elements or dramatically re-working a single shot, Dennis will show how in many cases the same techniques apply. He’ll cover the various challenges that face those who would tackle such tasks such as: masking, color correction, bending, and matching noise or grain.

Roll up your sleeves for this informative and inspirational workshop!

November 3, 2012
Strauss Studios 6442 SANTA MONICA BLVD.#204
Los Angeles, CA 90038-1513
10-2pm Includes lunch
APA members $30

ColorThink to the rescue! (Color Mapping for non-Color Geeks)

When it comes to working with digital images one of the most hotly contested topics can be: Which Color Space is best to work in? On some forums this is a question that can be sure to ignite quite the debate where sides are taken and defended with a religious ferocity that turns off all but the most devout color geeks. Flaming debates aside this is still an important question for photographers and anyone that works to produce high quality images.

Basically it comes down to this: each color space defines a particular range of colors that can be used. Among the usual suspects sRGB, which is based on the colors a typical lower end monitor can display, has the smallest gamut. On the other end of the scale is ProPhoto RGB which was designed to contain all the colors Kodak's Ektachrome slide file could possibly produce. In the middle lies Adobe RGB which many folks consider to be a good compromise between the 2 extremes.

The real answer is that what is best for you depends on the images you create and where you're planning to display them. And to help you visualize just how your images fit within the various color spaces I highly recommend doing a quick experiment using a great utility from my friend Steve Upton's company, Chromix, called ColorThink.



Steve and his crew are the kind of color geeks I love because they always strive to give you the straight story, making highly technical topics understandable by regular folks. In fact Steve is famous for comparing Color Management to the color of toast you get from your toaster. (Just how dark is dark?)

ColorThink is a very useful little program with a lot of cool tools for color geeks, but with regards to deciding which color space is best for you it has one tool in particular that let's us compare the colors contained in any particular image with the gamut of any particular color space.

So if you have a great shot of a landscape and you're wondering which color space is the best fit for this image you can use this tool to see just how it matches up with sRGB, Adobe RGB or ProPhoto RGB. As you test out more and more of your images you'll start to become more familiar with how any particular scene might match up with the color spaces and even be able to pre-visualize how you're going to process that image to get the result you're looking for. (Holy Ansel Adams!)

Here's how you do it.

1) Select a few sample RAW images and using your favorite RAW processor process one version of each image into each color space you want to compare it to. Save these test images as a JPEG or Tiff with the profile embedded. (If an image has already been processed into say sRGB of course all the colors will fit into sRGB. We're looking to see what happens to the colors as they're processed into the different color spaces.)

2) Open ColorThink, I'm using ColorThink 2.2, and bring up the 3D graph window.



3) Clicking on the Add button as shown above brings up a list of standard profiles. The standard RGB working spaces are already in this list so all you have to is click on the ones you want to use in the comparison. Below you can see that I've added Adobe RGB and have set it to show as a wire frame, (the easiest viewing method for our test here.)




4) To turn your image into a Color List that can be used for this test click on the Image Inspector button and navigate the "Open" dialogue to the image you want to use. Here is the image I used for my test:



5) As you can see this tool shows you the Embedded Profile and gives you a few options to get more info on the profile etc. From here instead of clicking on one of those options just click on the image preview and drag and drop the image onto your 3D graph window to add it to the graph.



You can see here that my image is now represented on the graph as a series of dots. These dots represent the various colors that are actually in the image. For this test I chose a version of the image I had processed into ProPhoto RGB and you can see there are just a few very light colors poking out above the wireframe of the Adobe RGB gamut.

6) When you move your cursor over the 3D Graph window it becomes a hand that lets you move the preview around in 3D space. To get a better view of just how the colors match up use the hand tool to spin the graph around watching as you do. Here is a different angle of view for that same graph that shows where those light colors poke out from the gamut of the Adobe RGB color space.



What we see here is that some very light colors on the red side are just beyond the gamut of the Adobe RGB space so now I have an idea of just what colors might be affected by using Adobe RGB compared to ProPhoto RGB.

One thing to keep in mind here is that this version of the image I used was processed out of Adobe's Camera Raw into the ProPhoto RGB space. The reason I did this was to see what colors may not fit into Adobe RGB. If I had processed the image into Adobe RGB from the Camera Raw then by definition all the colors would fit .

7) Now go back to Photoshop and open the ProPhoto RGB version and the Adobe RGB version and look to see what detail in the image might be represented by those light red colors and decide if the additional saturation you might get in those colors is important to you.

Note this does not mean you'll be losing detail in those areas, it just means the colors would have just a little more saturation. Whether that makes a difference is the question.

As an additional test open the ICC profile for your monitor in the 3D Graph window, (You have profiled your monitor, right?), and see how that lines up with both the colors in your image (just which colors are you not seeing?) as well as the gamut of the different RGB working spaces. Chances are that unless you have one of the extended gamut monitors the gamut of your monitor is very close to the gamut of the sRGB color space.

There are a few monitors that have a gamut that covers almost all of the Adobe RGB space. These include some higher end NEC's, Eizo's and a few Dell's (great bargains these Dell monitors). But as far as I know there are no monitors made yet that come close to the gamut of the very large ProPhoto color space. This means that if you're working in ProPhoto the colors you see poking outside the Adobe RGB gamut above will also be invisible to you as you work. But that's another debate entirely.

One last note: if you decide to work in the ProPhoto RGB space do make sure you work in the 16 bit depth. This space is so large that you'll definitely need the additional value steps the 16 bit depth gives you.

Bringing out the Sun with Bob Stevens

Last winter I had the pleasure of working on location with photographer Bob Stevens as he shot all over Southern California for Lincoln highlighting their latest line of luxury SUVs. After shooting in locations from downtown LA to the mountains above Santa Barbara the last day of the shoot called for an early morning shot at Cal Poly in Pomona.

This particular campaign called for romantic images featuring soft colors and sun flares and we had a narrow window of time when the sun would be in just the right position to get the shot Bob was after.

Bob is a very experienced photographer who has tackled a wide range of challenges and always comes back with what he needs to create a great shot for the client. But in this case we ran into a challenge that called for a little extra magic. You see while we had clear skies as the dawn came over the next couple of hours a stubborn bank of clouds decided to come in and hide the sun that was so important to making this shot work.

As the window of opportunity slowed crept by Bob decided to get several shots with the models using a large 10k light as a stand in for the sun. This gave me something to work with and as the Art Director waited on the sun Bob and I settled into the back of the motor home and went to work.

Within a couple of hours we had the shot dialed in, and when the Art Director saw the shot she happily proclaimed "That's beautiful!".

Photoshop's Clipping Groups

When Photoshop introduced Layers (way back in Version 3) organizing the Layers used in the course of compositing or retouching an image has become somewhat of a challenge. And if you work like I do the numbers of Layers in any particular image can really add up. For some of the movie posters and more complex images I've worked on I can easily use more than 100 Layers.

Luckily there are a couple of great tools available to help us keep those numerous Layers in line. Clipping Groups is one of those very useful tools that I use constantly. While it's not really a tool per se (you won't find Clipping Groups on your Tools palette) I use it so much that I consider it one of the more valuable tools in my arsonal.

So just what is a "Clipping Group"? Simply put it's an option used in the Layers palette that allows you to control where and how a Layer shows up based on the Layer it's "clipped" to.

Here's an example to show you just what I mean. In the image below you see there are 4 Layers: Background, Square, Circle and Triangle.



Here you can see how the 3 shapes all overlap each other. So far so good.

But supposed we only wanted the Red Circle to show up where it overlaps the Square and no where else? How would we do that? While some might suggest using a Layer Mask to hide the parts that spill out beyond the Square there is an easier way. What if we could use the Square Layer itself to control where the Red Circle shows up?

This is exactly what Clipping Groups do as you can see from the image below:




By clipping the Circle Layer to the Square Layer we're able to easily have the Square Layer control where the Circle Layer shows up. If you look at the Layers palette you'll see the bent arrow pointing from the Circle Layer to the Square Layer. This means it's now clipped to that layer as a Clipping Group.

So far so good for the Circle. But now what about the Triangle Layer? Can we clip that to the Square Layer too? The answer of course is:



As you can see from this image we're now using the Square Layer to control both the Circle and the Triangle Layers. And all of this is being done without using Layer Masks. Pretty cool, eh?

Now the question is just how can we create these Clipping Groups? The first thing that is needed is to make sure the Layers are arranged properly in the Layers palette. Since a Clipping Group is sort of like a stack of Layers the Layer that will be the base of the Clipping Group needs to be immediately below the Layers that will be clipped to it. As you can see in the Layers palette in this example the Circle and the Triangle Layers are right above the Square Layer. If we wanted just the Triangle to be clipped to the Square we'd have to move that Layer so it was the one immediately above the Square Layer.

Once we have the Layers arranged properly in the Layers palette there are 3 easy ways to create the Clipping Group. The first one is to hover the cursor right over the line separating the 2 Layers in the Layers palette while holding the Option Key (if you're on a PC machine that would be the Alt key) and when you see the cursor turn into the overlapping circles like you see below click on that line:



Clicking on the line then creates the Clipping Group like this:




An alternate way is to go to the Menu and choose Layers>Create Clipping Group as shown below:



Looking at the menu as shown here you can also see the third way to create the Clipping Group, by using the Shortcut Command + Option + G. (Or Control + Alt + G for those PC folk).

Now that we know how the basics of Clipping Groups work imagine that instead of basic shapes like used in the examples above we're working on something more complex like the image shown below:



If I could fit the entire Layers palette into the screen capture you'd be able to see this image has just over 50 Layers. As it is the Clipping Group for the girl uses 23 Layers by itself. In this image I used both regular Layers as well as Adjustment Layers all in one Clipping Group. And by using a Clipping Group I can leverage the mask for the girl which means for many of the Layers no other mask is needed.

Imagine the difficulty of working with this image if each and every Layer needed to use the same mask over and over and over. Besides the complexity one problem that would come up is that any little errors or feathered edges in the Mask would be multiplied many times over making it far more likely we'd see the problems it might cause which would then mean fixing that mask over and over and over.

Now that we've seen how Clipping Groups can work with both simple and complex images how will you use it to make your work easier?