Game Changer: Keep Multiple Animals Sharp At The Same Time

[Music] hey everyone steve from backcountry gallery here have you ever been in a situation where you had two or more animals in the frame and even though they were relatively close together you couldn't get them both sharp today i'll show you a combination photoshop and field technique that can sometimes overcome that problem first it's important to identify when you'll actually need the technique i'm about to show you so let's talk about the normal way to do this the normal way to get two animals sharp at once is to photograph them from an angle that puts the plane of focus on both of them at the same time these two elk were on the same plane of focus so there was no issue keeping them both sharp even with the lens wide open the second normal way of keeping two animals sharp is stopping down or using a shorter lens like i did in this shot with these two elephants of course this still works best when the animals are on the same focused plane or you know at least kind of close to it where we get into trouble is when you have small to medium-sized subjects at relatively close range so let's take this image here for example we have these prairie dogs let me zoom in a little bit and as you can see we have these three here this was taken with my 600 millimeter lens if i zoom in a little bit closer you can see a problem this guy is sharp and this guy is sharp their heads are close to the same plane of focus here because his head is sticking out a little bit but if you look at the guy on the back guess what he's not sharp at all is he and if you look at the distance from this eye to this eye it's what maybe like a a prairie dog with a way it's not a big difference here in distance but you can see this isn't even close to being critically sharp again this was with a 600 f4 and you might say well steve why didn't you just stop down to f8 so you can get this guy in here well guess what this was taken at f 13 and it still was not enough to bring this bad guy into focus and that's the problem when you have multiple animals in a frame especially at close range or when you have smaller animals that you're filling the frame relatively well with small and medium-sized animals even you can run into this problem where just a few inches here can make a big difference and you just can't stop down enough to get everything in focus and it brings up another problem here too if you take a look my background is relatively busy compared to what it would be had i shot this at f4 so there's a couple advantages to the technique i'm about to show you that kind of solves both of those problems at once so let's continue on my solution a focus stack i focus on the first animal shoot a quick burst then focus on the second animal and do another burst i then take the two images and combine them in photoshop as you'll see in just a few moments however as you can guess there are some downsides to this and it doesn't always work first the animals need to be relatively close together or you'll have a big out of focus gap between them ideally you don't want to see a ton of softness between the first animal and the second you want a little overlapping of that depth of field note that it doesn't have to be perfect but the closer the better second you obviously need a set of animals that isn't going to move too much between the shots most of the time i can pull this off in just a few seconds however if an animal moves too much it's not gonna work in fact i wasn't able to do it with a prairie dog example i showed you just a moment ago third you need to stay in position if you move from your position it changes perspective and makes the chances of pulling this off much much lower finally make no mistake sometimes this technique just doesn't work the animals are too far apart you move they move figure or 50 50 chance most of the time still it's often the only option and it's better than skipping the shot let's talk about how to do it field technique the field technique is easier than you may think most people worry that you have to be completely precise but the key is that for wildlife for wildlife you really don't need two perfectly aligned shots you're basically just going to have one primary image and blend that image with the sharp parts of the second shot we're going to use this image as an example and there's actually kind of two lessons in one here first though a little bit of background i took this image with a monopod a 600 f4 1.4 teleconverter and d6 it doesn't sound too bad but i was in a precarious position on the side of a steep hill that was a mix of rocks and mud all of which were conspiring to send me end over end all the way down to the bottom in fact i think i saw my wife checking my life insurance policy at one point while i was down there it was apparent that there was no way to get both the hen and the chick sharp in one click so i knew i needed a focus bracket i started with the mother and placed one of my upper af points on her eye and fired a burst this resulted in a little bit of the tail getting cut off but i knew i'd get that full tail when i went for the chick now due to my unstable situation i fear that if i focused and recomposed that i would maybe push the lens forward or back a little bit and knock the eye out of focus so i kept my af point on the eye with autofocus engaged and shot my burst to ensure a sharp eyeball next i adjusted my composition so my current af point was right on the check when you have subjects that are touching like this it's critical to get the shot before one of them moves and using the same af point is the fastest way to do it now if i think i have a little more time and if i'm in a little more stable situation i'll move the af point instead in fact that's my preferred way to go however in this case the little chick was really antsy and i already had missed a few attempts so i had to be quick by the way if the animals are touching especially with one a little behind the other it's far more difficult to pull this off after all if one of the animals moves how much of each animal is blocked or in contact with the other can change however if you have separation between the subjects it's not as critical since the space between them acts as a buffer in fact if the two animals aren't touching one or the other can you know move its head around change a pose whatever and you can still usually pull it off post-processing next let's put these two images together we'll start in lightroom okay so i'm going to demo this in photoshop for you so the first step is to find our images i have them selected right here or at least chosen so far so i'm going to select them now i'm going to give this one a click and hold the command or control key down and click this one that will allow me to select both of the images then i'm going to right click you do it on either one of them go down to edit in and open as layers in photoshop now i'm using lightroom for this so i'm able to do this i don't know what raw processor you're using so you may have to open the images up as just images in photoshop and then drag and drop them one on top the other but since i'm using lightroom and i think a lot of the people watching this are probably using lightroom we're going to do it this way open his layers in photoshop okay so here we are in photoshop and as you can see our images have been loaded in as layers if i turn the top one off though you can see we have a problem they are not aligned at all they're not even close and again as i said before this is not a problem it looks like a major problem but it's really not so all we have to do here is make sure these are both selected so i'm going to click one of them and hold my shift key down and click the other one i have them all selected then i'm going to go to the edit menu and i'm going to auto align layers give that a click use auto that works most of the time works really well hit ok and not only did photoshop line up our two layers for us it also expanded the canvas let me zoom down a little bit here it also expanded the canvas for us so that we have both of the images included that's usually the easiest way to do it however it doesn't always work sometimes if you try to line them up like this and it just doesn't work out the other way to do it is to drop opacity on one of the layers like so and then you can take the move tool drag that around and line it up yourself if you need to but i always recommend trying the auto align option first just because if it works it's very quick and it's very easy and most of the time it does work so put the opacity back up as a quick side note if you do need to manually move the pictures around like i just showed you by lowering the opacity on that make sure that you're concentrating on the area that you're going to be correcting or that you're going to be working on basically in this case it's the little chick so that would be the area that i would want to line up because sometimes the whole thing won't line up perfectly and you'll drive yourself crazy trying to get it there but in this case i would just be worried about whether or not that little chick was lined up and not worry about the rest because i don't necessarily have to use everything from that particular image i'm just concerned about that little check right there so our next step is to get all the sharp parts together for these two layers and usually i use layer masks for that however there is another way i'm going to show you i'm going to select both of these again using the shift key here i'm going to go to edit and auto blend layers and you can actually use the stack images option and i'm going to do content aware fill and it'll take care of those transparent areas now in theory this seems like it's going to be a really good idea the computer will actually photoshop will actually do all the hard work for us but the problem is it's a little bit less than ideal and i'm going to show you this is what happens a lot of times when i try this particular setup here this particular option if you notice we have some double images going around the beak some of this is soft some of the sharp it just didn't do a very good job and i find that's very typical with wildlife sometimes you can make that work most of the time you can't but i figured if i didn't at least mention it someone's going to say why didn't you just you know auto blend those layers this is why so if you're tempted to do that this might be a good reason why not to so i'm going to go back in history here and get us back to where we were okay so the way i would normally do this is with layer masks and it's actually pretty easy what i'm going to do is i'm going to put a layer mask here and then i'm going to reveal the layer underneath with a sharp chick so let's talk about that the first step is to put a layer mask in so we're going to click this layer mask and that puts a white layer mask here this is letting everything on this layer still show through white reveals and black conceals so anything i paint on here in black is actually going to hide stuff on this layer and let the stuff on the bottom layer which is the sharp stuff here for our little guy right here in the log and even the tail all that's going to show through so the idea here is we're going to grab our brush we're going to make sure it's a nice soft brush hardness is at zero opacity's at 100 all of that is good we're going to make sure black is on the top right here if you don't see that hit the letter d and then the letter x and that'll bring you right up to black and from here we're just going to do a little bit of painting we're going to make sure our layer mask is selected over here i'm going to zoom in just a little bit and watch what happens when i paint over that little chick as i'm painting with black we're hiding the out of focus chick on the top layer and letting the sharp little check on the bottom layer show through i'm going to go a little bit smaller whenever you get to these transition areas you want to use a little bit smaller brush when you're transitioning from one part of the image to the other i'm going to go down here if you notice these feathers are a little bit sharper right in through here where the chick is are on the chick layer we can call it the chick layer i guess and i'm just going to go right to the edge here you have to find those little boundaries when you're trying to manually blend to different sharpness levels between a couple of images here so what i'm doing here is i'm just going along those edges here and i'm going to use a little bigger brush here and get this log there we go that looks pretty good we have a nice sharp little check and mom's looking nice and sharp because we're not hiding mom here's what our layer mask looks like if i give this a click you can see that mom is actually completely in the clear here we're not hiding her at all so i'm going to go down here and what i'm going to do is i'm going to go back to my brush tool and i'm going to hide all of this layer right here all of this part of this top layer so we're seeing this bottom area here so this is the stuff that i want i want this nice tail here and i want all of this so i'm going to go in here and i'm just going to use my brush painting black again and i'm just painting right over all this there we go just like that now i have the tail in there it looks really nice and you can see the layer mask once again if you look over here i'll show it up there you can see that it's taking all the information here and it's letting us see that which is what we want now we have one little cleanup thing to do here if you notice we have this line right along this edge here and of course we don't want that so what we're going to do is go back to our brush once again double check make sure it's black make sure your layer mask is selected all that good stuff we're just going to brush over this like so just to kind of get rid of that and it usually goes away just like that it's usually pretty easy these soft brushes work really well for that by the way you do have to be careful if you go too far you'll start in this case getting into some blank area and the reason it's blank is because our layer mask let me show you is going all the way up there it's covering that area up but we don't have any information from our bottom layer here this is all blank on the bottom layer so there's nothing to actually show there so that's why that's disappearing like that so you do have to be careful of that as you're doing it if you see something like that you've just gone too far is all it means so from here i would make a composite layer which is command or control option alt shift and the letter e i'll put that keyboard shortcut up for you so from here i would just kind of do my finished work i would fill some of these areas in if i wanted them to i'd probably crop first kind of get it to the crop that i want something about like this so after you crop sometimes you run into the problem that you see right here we have some of these blank areas that we need to take care of in this case just an edge along the top here and this spot right here and not the end of the world and honestly not very uncommon this happens all the time with this technique so nothing to be concerned about we just used some content aware fill and it'll be fixed in just a second the easiest way to do this is with the rectangular marquee tool you can sometimes use the magic wand tool but the truth is sometimes you then have to go into selected mask and it just takes longer than it needs to just grab the rectangular marquee tool select the first little area like so and select outside of the image though so you're getting that edge right there you don't want to miss any part of that edge that will make sure that you have all of that and then i'm going to go along the top but i'm going to hold my shift key down as i do it and that will add to the existing selection like so and you can see we now have this selection and the selection added together and it just takes a few seconds to do it just make sure you leave a few pixels outside you don't want to be right next to it you just want to come just outside of the area that you want to fix so that's all there is to it pretty easy we're going to go to the edit menu content aware fill let photoshop work its magic here that looks good hit okay command or control d to deselect and it looks really good that's all there is to it very quick very easy to do from here you would just finalize the image either in photoshop or lightroom or whatever your preferred processing software is in fact i'll throw up my version of this image and as you can see i cleaned up some of the twiggy stuff and kind of finished up the post processing there but the bottom line here is that we started with two separate images each with a different bird sharp and we ended up with one single image where both of our birds are sharp which was our ultimate goal here so and it's not too terribly hard to do keep in mind that this was just one example some images are more difficult some are even easier the idea here was not to cover every single scenario but rather to show you the concept although i do want to point out that the less movement in the field from both you and the animals the easier the post-processing will go again this isn't a technique you can use every time but hopefully this is another addition you can add to your toolbox when you're out in the field and an opportunity presents itself if you enjoyed this video and want to learn even more be sure to check out all of my educational products between all of them there are thousands of pages and dozens of hours of video all of them jam-packed with information you can use every time you head out to the field finally remember to sign up for my free email newsletter get even more tips tricks and advice also check out the bcg forums page if you want solid reliable answers to all your photography questions and of course don't forget to like subscribe and get notified thanks so much for watching and have a great day you

Channel: Steve Perry

Views: 44,281

Keywords: photography tips, photography help, Backcountry Gallery, Steve Perry, nature photography, wildlife photography, keep multiple animals sharp at the same time, keep two animals sharp, sharp photo with multiple animals, sharp photo with two animals, two animals sharp, three animals sharp, focus on two animals at once, focus on multiple animals at once, focus on two birds at once, focus on multiple birds at once

Id: Yb-makl4ioE

Length: 16min 35sec (995 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 02 2020