Creating a realistic photo composite in Affinity Photo with Joseph Cristina

[Music] hey everybody welcome back thank you for joining me for tea time today we have a little misty morning so so so good a little bit of that bergamont I know anyways this is kind of odd I'm in the studio but most likely you're not watching me on my youtube channel are you you're most likely watching me over on affinities platform right affinities channel instead of mine why well it is locked down 2020 guys locked down 2020 and I have to say I'm absolutely honored honored to be selected as one of the 100 creatives worldwide to be featured here on lockdown 2020 thank you thank you if you've been around with me for the last year and a half thank you for your support and if you're brand new I hope you enjoyed this content so let me tell you who I am I'm Joseph Cristina I am a professional commercial photographer or videographer DP I'm a designer I'm also an inventor of photography products and in my spare time because I have so much of it I cover the industry both tech as well as photo and I've been doing that for the last decade now as a point of reference let me just say I've been using Adobe software for the last 20 years to decades guys to decades well as of may 20 19 I went cold turkey and deleted every single piece of their software from this system as well as all of the computers in the studio and that's what gave rise to life after Adobe cutting the court over on my channel that series has been doing absolutely fantastic now I went ahead and tested a ton of software to be able to see what type of alternative we can use in studio to produce professional work and after looking at everything I ended up going with affinity products that's affinity photo designer as well as publisher now this is not a promotion this is not an ad spot if you with me in the past year and a half you know that I am 100% unbiased so what I'm telling you is simply fast that being said today we're going to be doing compositing but I'm not just gonna show you the how but more importantly I'm gonna tell you the why because sometimes why is more important than the how you need to know why so that you can produce something amazing now like every great photo like great composites they start with an interesting background and most importantly the analysis of the light in that background why is that well if you get the light wrong that's the direction the color the intensity the foreground is going to stick out like a sore thumb and that is something that we don't want to happen so for this demonstration I brought in a model now normally I would use the two backdrops that we have here in studio but they're currently being used so what I ended up using was the back wall behind our studio outside we did an outside shoot what's good about this is it shows you that you can do it without having hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of equipment you can kind of do it on a budget now the back wall behind our studio is about 60 feet long by about 13 14 feet tall and it is a hundred percent white so it works out really good so what I did is I brought out one of our pallets a piece of plywood and a short roll of white backdrop paper to create like a makeshift platform for a model now here's a pro tip for you when bringing in a model for a client always always always overshoot Moore is not just more in this situation Moore is simply smart so later in post-production you or your client simply have more options use your time with your models wisely time is money [Music] so at the time I didn't know which of the three backgrounds I was going to use for this demonstration so I shot all three the first one was a diffused light coming in on the model from the upper left-hand corner so I used an umbrella to soften the light the second image was directional light coming in from the left hand side that was shot bare bulb and similarly the third one was also shot bare bulb by coming in from the right hand side slightly upper right hand side so guys let's jump right into my desktop let's start out with the backgrounds that I selected so this right here would be background number one I did not use it for this demonstration but I did make a composite with it this is background number two and finally this is background number three now background two is the one that we're going to use now as you can see the lighting is coming from this direction and it is extremely harsh now let's jump into our raw editor now here are some of the photos that I took during this photo session now remember I shot the model three different ways as you can see there's three different lighting setups the first lighting setup we have the light coming in from the top very soft upper left-hand corner the second one we have more directional coming in from the left-hand side and then finally we have harsh light coming in from the right-hand side now the one that we're going to use is this one now to start out with I always take the PRT which is my photo reference tool and I'll use this to get a baseline for color if we take the eyedropper and hover over this gray area we can see that it neutralizes the image and on the other side of the card with all of the swatches which is the dual access color control we can use that same eye dropper and just move around the card until we get the color just the way we wanted now the question is how do we want it so let's go ahead and bring up that background image once again you move this over to the side and I'll do the same thing with this raw editor and as we move around the card we can see how the color is changing what we want to do is we want to get some blues in there and maybe a little bit of green this is a good base right here it's coming up as 36 25 by 22 we can make the corrections after in the main image but that's all we have to do is dial it in right here to those numbers and we'll get that specific color range now I already made all of the corrections so you don't have to sit through it and here they are now we're going to take this image into a Finity photo and finally we're going to drag in our background image and there they are we have the dancer here and we have the background image here now before we do anything it is always a good practice to duplicate your background this way you have a baseline if you ever want to go back to it you can so we're going to be working on this layer right above the background layer now we need to remove this man from this background now what we're going to use is the inpainting brush tool that can be found over here by the Healing Brush come down this menu and here it is in painting brush tool now let's change the size of our brush a little bit that's perfect and we're gonna go from the top and we're gonna go all the way around this man but we're just going to stop right around his feet we'll do the feet after we only want to go slightly over the edge we don't want a ton over the edge just enough so that the software knows what we are removing that looks pretty good now let's let affinity photo do the work now that's a pretty darn good job let's back up you can see there's a little bit of a darkness here and here we can fix that using our healing brush and we do have these random feet hanging here but that's okay we'll fix that after let's clean this sky up just a little bit we're going to swap from our in painting brush over to our healing brush now let's increase the size of that brush and grab some sky over here and drag it over to here maybe some over here just like that that looks pretty good now we can see that the mountains are kind of messed up let's take this mountain and move it right over there that looks good now if we back up I like it not bad at all now we're going to switch from our healing brush back over to our in painting brush we're going to zoom in and we're going to take this brush down so it's much tighter because we're doing a more exacting job we're gonna go just around this edge all the way around this foot and that should do it let's see how well Finity takes his foot away there we go that is really really nice let's move over to the other one [Music] that is really a great job I think that looks fantastic so now we're going to move our model in but before we do we need to see how big the model needs to be in this image so that it makes sense so let's bring the guy back up now I'm going to create a new layer this layer is going to be deleted later so we're going to mark the height of the guy he's from here to here and the lighting obviously is coming in at this direction this way we have a guide so when we put our model on this background we know her size so let's shut this off and now remove the man so now we're going to select our model to be able to pull her off the background now to do that we're going to use our selection brush tool but with the new versions of affinity photo there is the ability to use soft edges and we're going to want to make sure that this is check marked what that will do is we'll reduce the hard edge when we pull the model off the background making it look a lot more realistic now I'm going to change our brush size and only select our model this way affinity photo knows what is the foreground and what is the background that needs to be removed now that's pretty good now there's multiple ways to be able to really dial this in even better for me I like to use refined now what this does is it shows exactly what is going to be considered background in what will be pulled out as the foreground now there's three adjustment brushes that we want to be aware of number one is matte the second one is foreground and background now if we use matte what this is going to do is tell affinity that we want affinity to decide what's foreground and background and we're going to select both the foreground and background this is perfect for hair so when we click this you can see that it really did a good job pulling out those little hairs but we can see some of the scalp has some red in it so what we're going to do is use the foreground brush to paint in what is definitely foreground and you'll see that affinity will do this calculations and remove this foreground area but in so doing it has opened up some of this background so at this point we're going to use the background tool and say listen this is background do not consider this foreground now it does its recalculations and there you go it does a fantastic job now what I'm going to do is I'm going to go over the entire image like this and I'm going to speed through this you don't have to watch me do it but bear in mind the final composite is only as good as this selection or this mask if it's not done well later on when we composite the background to the foreground you will see all of those imperfections so do a good job now and is going to save you time later [Music] so that looks pretty good let's go up to edit copy flattened and then flip over to our background scene and hit edit paste now we can move her out of the way for right now what we want to do is turn on that layer where we drew the size of the person that we took out of this background we can bring him back just as a reference now she's gonna need to be about the same size now we know her feet are probably gonna be about the same size if not a little bit smaller than his so we can always use that as a reference also let's go ahead and bring her down to about the right size and now we can remove him from the image there we go perfect now that's looking pretty good we're gonna put her foot right on the tippy top of this mountain unless to give you a little bit of an uneasy feeling like if she's gonna fall off right there perfect now we can remove these reference lines and now we have something coming along here pretty good we're going to make some Corrections now inside affinity photo to make it even better so that it really looks like she belongs in this image so before we go any further let's take the branding off her shorts we really don't need these shorts to say Nike now let's go ahead and use our patch tool that's right over here and we have to select the layer that we're going to patch and that would be this primary layer we're gonna go all the way around this logo just like that that looks pretty good there's a little bit of white sticking out right here we can just switch this over to a healing brush take that brush down a little bit select another area that we want to pick this black up and just go over that little area this information here you can't read so we're gonna leave that alone we can also while we're here remove this little thread right here that works now keep in mind like I've said before you do not have to do these extreme details if the image is going to be seen at a small resolution like this or a small size there's no reason to remove a thread that you'll never see but if we're going to print this large then it's probably best to remove that thread now we'll go through this if there's anything else there's a couple of little marks here we'll go and remove those while we're at it and we'll just see if we can find any other spots that should be removed there's some redness right here we can get rid of that's fine go into our face there's a couple of little spots here a little something on our cheek get rid of that perfect and like I said we do not have to clean this up a hundred and ten percent if there's something that you want to remove now is the time to do it and that looks pretty good to me now when we look at this image there's a couple of things that stands out is the darkness of this black on her shorts in comparison to the absolute darkness to this mountain so we could do one of two things we could either lift the black on her shorts or darken the blacks on the mountain I think what I'd like to do is to increase the contrast overall in these mountains and by so doing darken those blacks up so let's go ahead and make a quick selection over the mountain and before we do we have to select the background that we are going to be modifying and we're gonna go over the mountain just like this perfect and we'll come in here and we'll reduce some of this right here we'll remove that down a little bit we'll add this in that's good everything else looks pretty good it doesn't have to be absolutely perfect because that's all we're gonna do is darken these blacks up just a little bit so now let's go to levels and we're going to slowly move our blacks till they look just about the same darkness level as for shorts and I think that is pretty good right about there now how do we know if this is the case or not very simply if we come up here to view and then go down to studio and turn on info that will bring up this panel over here if we hover over her shorts as you can see the RGB in this column reads as 0 0 0 255 now if we go to the blackest area of these mountains right about here you can see that we have two for green 4 for blue and 255 so we know that these mountains are slightly ever so slightly more blue than her shorts which is absolutely perfect we don't have to worry about it that is no problem at all it's a good way to check reference points in your image for color as well as contrast so this looks pretty good now we could deselect by hitting command D now we're going to move on to the next problem what I would like to do is to brighten up these highlights and darken a little bit more of the back of her leg okay so we're gonna add another adjustment layer now we want to select the layer that our model is on add a levels adjustment layer and before we edit it I want to show you what happens if we do not put this underneath this layer if we make a modification as you can see it is affecting the entire image so let's get out of this for a second I want to take this levels adjustment layer and put it underneath the models layer and as you can see now only the model is being adjusted here so let's open that back up we'll fix that a little bit it's ok if we push this really far because I'm going to create a mask over this to adjust it even more and now we're going to come down here to this mask and in this mask selection we're going to use a brush change our brush color to black and we can paint over this and remove some if we need to so let's go ahead and paint over where her face is because we don't want all of that darkness up here at all the back of this arm that can stay like that the tip of her foot over here we want to be extremely white down this leg we want very white all this needs to be nice and shiny the tip of her hand needs to remain white as well as the top and now her stomach here should be getting a lot more light than what it is so we're gonna reduce some of it just like that perfect I like this darkness back here we're gonna just highlight it just a little bit just to remove some of that darkness just like that now that looks pretty good we're gonna add to this another adjustment layer but this time on the highlights we want to really blow out these highlights where this Sun is hitting her so let's go ahead and make another adjustment layer this time it's going to be once again levels but we're going to adjust the white of the levels just like this now you can see how we can really push these far we're gonna back this off just a little bit just about like that and then we're gonna once again add a mask to this layer so that we can be a little bit more granular with it so her shirt is fully blown out so we're gonna reduce some of that we're gonna paint over this with our brush we're gonna come in here and her face is slightly blown out so we're gonna reduce that just ever so slightly her arm it's okay if it has a little bit of that white blown out look to it tip of her foot this looks fine now another thing that I see that needs to be addressed here is the saturation I feel that it's still overly saturated in comparison to the rest of the image so let's go ahead and fix that this time we're going to add a vibrancy layer now this layer allows you to adjust vibrancy as well as saturation so before I make that adjustment let me make sure that this is pulled down underneath our model so that it only adjusts her and not the entire scene so let's go in here and make this correction or this adjustment now I'm going to pull vibrance all the way back and then we're gonna once again add a layer mask to this so we click our mask button now we can determine what is more saturated by simply brushing on that vibrancy let's go ahead and use our brush we know if the Sun is coming in in this direction most likely her face will be a lot more vibrant than the back of her legs and in the shadow area and her foot so what we're gonna do is paint in this vibrancy over this area where the Sun will be hitting her see how she's getting that color back I want to take this side of her leg that's hitting the Sun and really make sure that that vibrancy is turned up I'm gonna put a little bit of that color back into her leg just like that and a little bit on the top of her foot not the back of her foot so let's back out see what we have that is looking really quite good now there's one more thing that I'm going to do here is I'm going to really solidify that her foot is actually on this mountain so what we're going to do is we're going to remove some of this shadows that are here and then paint our own shadows onto this so let's select the model layer and we're going to use our eraser tool to come in here and remove little bit of this shadowing and now we're gonna add one more layer to paint in some of this darkness this shadowing so we're gonna make another layer just underneath our models layer this way if we paint here nothing will show up on her because we are underneath her layer let's go to this layer and change it to multiply and then grab our brush tool and we're going to paint on some shadowing and there you go here is the final composition I had a blast putting this together this was a lot of fun and as promised here are the two other images that didn't make it into this demonstration so the first one here you see is that soft light this is the one that we use the umbrella for and the light was coming in from the upper left hand side of the model I love this this is just beautiful and finally this one was shot bare bulb from the right hand side I also like this on the mountain top so I want to say thank you to Sarah for this opportunity and I want to thank you guys for joining me for this short time hopefully you've gotten something out of this video and if you have please give this video a thumbs up that would be helpful and don't forget to subscribe to affinities Channel after you do that head over to my channel over at youtube-dot-com forward-slash J Kristina photo once again youtube.com forward slash J Kristina photo and subscribe to my channel for more of this stuff and as a way for me to say thank you for getting to the end of this video I want to give you my ebook for free and over to my website J Kristina comm /e book once again J Kristina comm /e book 10 tips of getting sharper images how to do it great for amateurs great for professionals something in there for everyone so once again go download it J Kristina comm /e book so that's it I am out of here many blessings to you and your family stay safe and stay healthy [Music] you

Channel: Affinity

Views: 22,216

Keywords: Produce photo composite, Affinity Photo tutorial, creating realistic photo composite, using Affinity Photo, photo editing software, photo editing tips, photographer tips, photo composite, photo editing, Affinity Photo

Id: C--zy7Bedu4

Length: 34min 47sec (2087 seconds)

Published: Mon May 11 2020