I'm just going to jump right into it. I'll show you the finished product and go through it set by step.
Before I did anything, I had to get a picture of me with all that gear on. Just taking a picture with normal light wouldn't fit right with the background. There had to be simulation of the lighting you would find in a blizzard or on a windy, sunny, cold day. I went with the latter, and decided to make it super sunny out. Maybe all that snow flying around could be from high winds or something, cause if it was snowing then there would be super flat lighting.
Anyway, how to recreate the sun and the sun on snow. We know that sun makes hard shadows, but snow acts a reflector and fills shadows in. So how do you make that lighting with strobes? The way I did it was to put a bare strobe up and above my right shoulder and a umbrella down and to my left. The strobe, a 560, up high as the same as the sun. Hard light and very intense. The umbrella, also a 560, was the bounced back light off of the snow. Together they recreate the lighting concisions of a sunny day out in snowy Montana. Not perfect, but close. To finish it off, I added the mini light the background to nuke everything and make a nice rim light. This was in part to make the background easy to cut out later, but also get some good highlights around me.
Camera settings were f2.2, ISO100, and 1/200. Bare 560 at 1/64, umbrella at 1/128, and mini light at full nuke settings as always.
I'm not going to be able to explain everything that I did in Ps, but I'll try to cover all the problems/solutions/techniques I use to blend.
First thing I was cut myself off from the background. Since it was all white, I could simply select the white and hit delete. Easy as cake, or is it pie? Piece of pie, err cake? Always forget the saying... ANYWHO
Next was to add the background in. I found one online that was pretty close to what I needed. For this you don't need something detailed. Just a snowy background with general shapes to give some depth and steadiness to the image. Something to root the picture in space. I added my selected picture in behind me, and adjusted the levels of it to really blow it out. Like I just said, it's not too important.
Now to get rid of the reflection in my goggles. There was a pesky reflection of my umbrella in them, so I decided to just repaint a new lens. I started with white, then added a gradient, orange tint, and massively raised the contrast on that. I repeated this again to get more of that shiny, reflective quality lenses have. Then I added some shadows in around the edges of the lens to give it depth. Finally, I took my eyes from another picture, and overlaid them to the painted lens. This gave the lens more black and depth, and it also made it blend more with the image. A reflective lens by it's self looks really fake, but if you can see through it, it makes it a little better.
It needs to be snowing, right? Making snow is almost exactly like making rain from my last Ps adventure. Add a layer of noise, add some blur (more for the snow), add some motion blur, and then play with the levels to make it look like snow. Adding noise makes wayyyy too much "snow," and so you have to raise the contrast a lot to cut out all the unneeded flakes. I repeated this whole process three times, each time making the flakes a different size and density to add some depth to it.
In a nutshell, that's how I made this. Obviously there was a lot more involved, but sadly I do not have the time to write everything out, nor would that be that helpful as it's hard to follow steps in writing with no visual aid. Maybe I'll try to get some screen recordings going next time...ideas ideas....
See you tomorrow.
No comments:
Post a Comment