Light Painting Church Editing Tutorial

well hello there and welcome to another episode on the channel you know I've just been whipping through my 20/20 nightscape images calendar and I've come to the month of August and this beautiful old red brick church building you can see it there and it just so happens that this particular building is just down the road from where I'm located just at the moment and I thought what I might do is continue my series on post-processing so this particular image took a fair bit of work in post to to get into this state so what I'm going to do is take your data and give you a look and we'll go from there [Music] well look at that isn't that just an absolutely beautiful old brick church and the structure and you know I don't think it's used as a church anymore I'm pretty sure that it's been bought as a private concern but I don't no one's living there it's you can see there's no maintenance done much here at all so it's been sitting out here for decades and you know I couldn't resist them one night coming here and shooting this so except the camera just inside here actually exactly on this angle Milky Way call up there in the sky behind absolutely beautiful was it was in September when I shot this about 12 months ago and it was completely dark out here there's no streetlights no nothing quite as anything and so required a fair bit of light painting as you can see because it's quite a large building and so what I did I took one shot full of the background sky and I remember shooting that with my nikon d750 in the 20 millimeter if 1.8 shot that at f/2 0.28 ISO 5000 at 15 second shutter speed and then I took 18 that's right 18 like painted foreground subjects so I walked all around the front and the side of this building remember never lighting from the same angle as the camera so the camera was just down here just have the other side of the fence and I got over there over here and lit various parts of the church and the building and eighteen of them in fact and a big part of this video is I'm going to show you how I post-produced that image and I think it's important for you to see so I shot those at f/4 20-second chatter speed and ISO 500 so once again I've I've made sure what I've stopped down my aperture a bit made sure my focus was sharp on the building but that would have been anyway because that's probably 15 20 meters away from my camera so if you look at the depth of field chart you'll see that a 20 millimeter lens even at F 2.8 has a focus distance of about 6 meters maybe seven to get infinity but even so sometimes just to be sure I like to add a margin for there and I'll make sure my fault Gran's a sharp anyway so I always do the adjustment and from there I just walked around did the like painting now I'm going to show you now how I did the post-production on this image so let's go have a look at that okay so here we are back in the studio and now I'm going to show you exactly how I edited this gorgeous image and how I got the final result so let's get straight into it now as usual you can see we begin in Lightroom and what we have here is a single background image shot out in the field you can see this is shot with the 20 millimeter if 1.8 lens set to F 2.2 15 second shutter speed at iso 5000 so that shot with a nikon d750 now I did shoot about 4 images you can see them down the bottom here and the problem I had was that there was a fair bit of cloud cover the reason I didn't process all of these and perhaps stack them all together like I have been doing more recently is because of that fast-moving clar that it sort of plays havoc a fair bit with the stacking process in sequela so i decided for this particular one just to approach this a single image and you can see there's a lot of clad in this shot but you know many times I think clared actually adds to the overall dynamics of the background sky now what have I done to that image well as you can see I've increased the exposure a little bit a contrast as well drop the highlights added some whites and that is pretty much a standard processing for what I do for nearly all of my images just rolling down a little bit you can see the only other thing I've done here is enable lens Corrections I've removed chromatic aberration and enable profile Corrections and the other thing I've done is enabled some noise reduction so I've increased the luminance to 30 and also the contrast to 30 everything else every other City at this stage I haven't changed at all the white balance that's where I had it set 3800 the tip - ooh that's just standard straight out of the camera so you can see what I've done now if I look at the before and after here you can see largely all the way back he done he's increased brightness and some of the saturation levels in in the sky because ultimately the foreground is just a black silhouette anyway so I haven't had to do pretty much anything at this point in time but we're getting to that because now I'm going to show you that I took well let me see let's open that one up so this is the first of the foreground like painted images that I shot now you'll notice I've shot these at f/4 up here 20 second shutter speed at ISO 500 so effectively what I've done I've closed down the aperture a bit lowered the ISO a long way from where it was for the sky at 5,000 that's down to 500 and lengthen each other speed a bit so I've got a little bit more time to get around to shoot the various angles now what I've done here before I go on with this I want to show you I've got 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 I've got 18 foreground shots now that's a lot now it's quite possible I'm not going to need all 18 of these images because when you're doing light painting in the field one of the things that is tricky and difficult about like painting a subject like this old church is the fact that sometimes you forget what you've actually lit and so you do it more than once so it's quite possible with that some of these 18 I've got a similar image and I won't need to use them all but what I've found is it's best to unless it's really obvious it's best to process the ones you've got and then it's it's pretty much a process of illumination after that so once I get down further probably when I get to Photoshop that'll be the time when I work out well I don't need that and don't need that so I'll just move on but currently I'm just going to work on all of them now I've already done the to save time on this video I've already already done the adjustments but I'm going to show you what they were now this first image you can see I've increased the exposure a long way plus two because it was it was really underexposed if you look at the original you can hardly see that light I just lifted the exposure up here and because of my low ISO I can do this and get away with it without any noise it's really really handy that's one of the main reasons that I dropped the ISO dance so much and the fact that I've also closed down the aperture gives me a much sharper image so when i zoom in on that you can see that's really sharp now even at those settings you can see there's still stars being captured which is fascinating isn't it mind you I don't want those stars I'm going to have to get rid of those stars later on but as it stands that's just what the image looks like so what I'm going to do before I go I'll show you some other things I did before I move on so I've dropped the highlights increase the whites and also increase the clarity now for a lot of these foreground images especially stuff like this with bricks and stone work and and rusty old vehicles and things like that Pharma showing me that I like to shoot I always increase the clarity because it really punches the image that's just that little bit more now if I go down further you can see there's no adjustments here at all until I get down to once again the lens profile Corrections so I've enabled profile Corrections and remove chromatic aberration and noise reduction now I've made the noise reduction here 19 for luminance and 19 for contrast so it's roughly about 20 a little bit less than what I did for the sky why is that because there's less noise an image that's a lower ISO so there's therefore less noise so I don't need as much noise reduction I've put a bit in there because you'll always get some noise reduction with these long exposures so what I'm going to do now is highlight all of the images that I'm going to be processing and you can see them here I've got one background this one here is a background layer and all the rest of these ones are foreground layers and open them in Photoshop so what do I do right click on any one of those images go up to here it says edit in down to the bottom open as layers in Photoshop now you've seen me do this on a number of occasions and I think I mentioned to you the last time we did a video with post-processing just how repetitive a lot of the steps are and that is so true and I guess that's part of the good thing because it helps us remember all of the various steps that we want to be going through all right while we have all of those layers open now and it took quite a while now depending on the machine you're working on particularly if you're working on a laptop this could take a long time so rights are just going to pour yourself a cup of tea having a rest and they're coming back a bit later but anyway you will notice they've come in in the order that they were shot in other words the background image here is on top of the stack so I need that to be on the bottom so I'm going to grab it and drag it all the way down to the bottom and there we go drag it all the way down to the bottom so now with Photoshop as you can see you're only seeing the top layer and if I turn each of those layers off you can see you start to be able to see the layer that's underneath and you can see all the various like painting shots that I took for this particular image what I want to do is turn all those back on now to get this is something I usually do to get an idea I guess a quick preview of what this is going to look like what I'm going to do is click on the top layer and then the second last layer hold down shift on my keyboard and that selects all of those layers now I'm going to go up to here the blend mode which currently says normal and I'm simply going to change that to lighten and now what you will notice is all of the layers with transparency so I can see through the dark areas in other words I can see the sky of all of the layers particularly the sky of the background layer which is the one that I really want to use now this looks pretty good except this way too much stuff in there we'll need to get rid of for example here these squiggles here that's me with my torch light painting you can see them again here over here here in here so often when you like painting a subject like this especially these bigger ones you will get in the shot no worries about that at all so that isn't an issue at all but at this stage in the processing we've got to get rid of that the other thing I need to get rid of is all of these stars you can see it's taken quite a while to actually do the like painting and and in doing so we've created almost like star trails of these dots each dot is a different exposure because I've got so many of them there's a lot look at that because there's so many stars there I need to get rid of because I'm going to only use this one but the problem is as I as you can see when I turn some of these layers on you see all these other stars I don't want them there so normally what I would do is add a layer mask to this top layer and then just select the paintbrush tool they're using that layer mask and rub it out but because of the very straight angles here on this building I have found it to be a problematic sometimes and especially in this image where when I exposed all of these images the clouds were coming and going and what that means is sometimes you can see the stars along the edges and sometimes you can't so if I do a layer mask on one of these images and then find that I can't see the stars of it what that effectively means is if I'm copying and pasting the layer mask which I have done plenty of times and I usually do sometimes the stars will show through so in this particular example what I'm going to do is create a layer mask here on this bottom layer just bear with me and I'll show you what I'm doing which is this background sky this church is just a shadow and I'm actually going to grab a selection tool up here quick selection tool and I'm just going to go like this this is very common people don't use these quick selection tools all the time you can see what it's done now that's pretty good except I'm missing these two crosses here it's missed it a little bit of the tree over here so I'll fix it up we're just going to zoom in a little bit closer so we can see what's going on and a bit closer again now this cross we're going to fix that up so what I'm going to do is simply click around the cross and that's done a pretty good job of selecting that little bit there I'm going to try and get rid of so I'll just click up here and that hopefully will take it away it's not a great disaster to be honest even if it didn't do that because I'll fix it up later but that looks good let's get ups let's go to the next cross up and see if that one's been selected nope we've missed that one as well so once again I've got my tool here which is adding to this selection I'm just going to click on it like that and Photoshop is going to determine rough good job there didn't determine what I need let's go to the next cross and it's already got that one selected fantastic let's go down the side yeah that looks really good it's got most of that tree I'll just add a little bit here it doesn't matter this this tree is nowhere near a problem so I'm not too concerned about the tree because the tree is not really even relevant I think this tree is just a dark silhouette anyway but um I'll just do it to show you what I'm talking about so here I'm just going to add in this tree and the software is a bit confused in this area here which is understandable because it's just a pretty shadow if you give it that looks pretty good you will be aware that I often don't do this in my night scopes so this is the first time I've actually used that quick selection tool in ages because I usually don't need to I just rub it out manually now what I have to do is actually copy this layer mask down here to all of these other layers so what I'm going to do is just hold down alt on my keyboard and drag it all the way to the top layer and you can see now that has been applied to the top layer I'm going to turn off the bottom layer for the time being and there you can see that layer mask is on this top layer so all I need to do now is make sure I click on the layer mask go over here to my paintbrush tool make sure I'm on black on the bottom there and hundred percent opacity and all I'm going to do is rub out the sky now this is really cool because you can see I can't rub out underneath the sky in other words I'm just going over it like so you can see I'm going over the edges but it's not actually rubbing out anything because of my selection you can see the selection is still well selected and therefore this is making it a lot easier to select the building so I'm just going to do this go over all those edges make sure I've got that rub out the rest of the sky remember I'm using layer mask over here and I'm using the paintbrush tool to do so it doesn't matter if I've got a heart or a soft brush because I'm just painting over the whole thing alright how's that fantastic now if I turn on the bottom layer there's my sky shining through and if I press I go up to select and press deselect suddenly I've got a beautiful clean mask around my church building and that was pretty quick so especially with these nice hard straight edges like buildings like this it's really easy to do this so what I'm going to do now is on this bottom layer I don't need that layer mask anymore so I'm going to click on the layer mask and delete it and actually I'll leave it on now as I go down here and turn these on all I need do now let me just turn them all on so you can see what I'm talking about so I've still got all of these stars in here but as I go down and copy this layer mask by holding down alt on the keyboard onto each layer you will see that gradually all of those start Rayleigh extra star stars that I don't want in my image will disappear doesn't take long to do this and I could possibly do this as a group but I'm not going to do that I wanted to show you individually what this does because it's really cool I'm just copying I'm holding down alt on the keyboard and dragging a layer mask down from one layer to the next and you can see what's going on here so we get to the bottom and suddenly all of those random stars are gone now isn't that a really quick way of doing it now of course you can see that we still have all of these light trails here to get rid of so that's my next job what I have to do is work out which layers they're on so to do that all I have to do is turn off the individual layers until I see something one of those light trails disappear and when I do we're still going okay there's one over here see this one here that disappeared when I turned that layer off that indicates that that particular light painting is on that layer so I'll just go over and rub it out easy is that simple is anything okay there's another one so that why not click on the layer mask and go over here rub it up let's go down and see what else we can find not that one oh yeah there's a little bit you gotta have good eyes for this just there just rub that taut yet let's go down a bit further I don't think so don't think so no oh there we go this one that's a big one so just here that's an easy rabbit now remember I'm still got a brush tool and it's it's a hard brush I'll probably use a soft brush from here on because it's just a little bit less obvious when you touch an edge there's a big one so we're going to turn that one click on the layer mask it's important to be on the layer mask and not the layer that's just rubbing it so that has to be on a hundred percent opacity up here all right there we go and we've got this one in here to get rid of can you see that one so hopefully it's on this last layer and there it is click on it click on the layer mask and gently rub it up and from here we can continue with their edits to the image like I said you at the very beginning there's some of these layers that are very possibly not even required and I'm just going to turn some of them off as you can see that one I'm gonna feather some of that so I'm gonna change my brush to about 70% make that a larger brush and feather it see how I'm actually painting above where the light is just to sort of soften that a little bit so rather than just turn the layer off completely which would look like that I've just softened the effects of that a little bit now you will have different opinion on what you like and what you don't like that's fine we all have our opinions and we will all have our preferences for what we want to do so I'm going through turning layers on and off just to see what the difference is this layer here's a good example I like a bit of that light but I don't like the bit on the end so I'm just gonna rub the end be there but I'm leaving the bit that comes in a bit further a bit more solid okay so I'm going through turning layers off you can see that's a quite a hefty change I'll just I'll just leave it for the moment but I might come back to that one that one's very important so I'm not going to move that one so this is the front grass now they're definitely that needs softening out so what I'm going to do is just make the image a lot smaller that gives me room to make my brush bigger and feather it across the edge so you can see what I'm doing here creating a feather on my brush and I'm not rubbing the whole layer out I'm just rubbing it bits and making that still come in towards the edge of it which is just what I want I want the grass to be in the shop that's why I lit it okay let's just move back to the next one that's quite a heavy again I'm going to do the same thing just go to the edge and feather right on the edge here so it looks like the light is spilling a little bit more into the image you know I can be very pedantic with this not really the point of this exercise is to be pedantic I just want to show you the methods and the techniques that's my main aim here that looks really good I like the way that the the actual light has got dark areas and light areas so that's the main reason for doing this light painting in the method now I've disabled two of the layers at this point in time because I don't think there's any more that I don't actually like so what I'm doing now is just going back through them turning them on and off gradually just a workout there's anything that I can modify whilst I'm going here well no that one's quite aggressive but I like I really do like some of those hard edges so you can see the areas that have been deliberately lit to create a bit of highlight remember if I change this to white I can paint things back in so this is a very much a non-destructive workflow which which is part of the attraction I love that all right I like it that's really bold so you can see here out of all these layers there's only two that I've disabled totally the rest I've done a little bit of modification on some of them just to move on I'm looking at the the background sky layer here what I'm going to do is add what's known as an adjustment layer little circle at the bottom click on that and go up to the curves adjustment layer this gives you a little graphical display of the histogram I'm gonna just lift the highlights a bit here I'm actually just putting a standard s-curve I'm gonna drop the lower tones not that much just about there and you can see what that is actually done as it's just giving a bit more punch to the Milky Way now if because that actually adds a layer mask if I don't like some of that selection what I can do and I will just to show you if I think for example that white is too bright all I need to do here is just paint it by getting remember I might I'm gonna 70% opacity I'm on the working on this layer mask on the curves layer here so I can just drop that down if I think that's not quite right but I don't mind it but I'll just do a little bit it's not particularly dodging and burning in the true sense of the word I'm just taking a little bit of the intensity of that curve as you can see up here when I lifted that up it makes the white areas of the image increasing in brightness only the background not the church itself because it's I'm only working on this bottom layer down here okay I think that looks pretty good so what I'm going to do now is flatten this image that's a massive file size at 3 gigabytes then here you can see 3 gigabyte file way too big for me to keep that as a layered TIFF file so what I'm going to do is go up to here where it says layer got in the bottom flattened image discard hidden layers they're the ones that I haven't enabled here and I'll say yes to that now you can see it's back to 139 megabytes much more manageable file I like the look of that see it's got the darkest edges got some highlights around the building okay so I'm going to cross out a Photoshop I finished there say yes to that what that will do now is take the file back as a flattened TIFF file back into Lightroom Lightroom opens up and there we have it there's our file now one of the things I'm going to do here before you can see because of the wide-angle lens it wasn't that ultra wide but I was using a 20 millimeter focal length there's a lot of angular distortion here so I'm going to go down yes I'm going to go to into the transform heading here and do a vertical trying to straighten up a little bit those edges you can only go a certain amount before you lose you start to lose all the edging here as you can see I've lost a fair bit there because what's happened here I've lost real estate you can see here but when I go into the crop tool I can move my image around a little bit within that crop and I don't mind me losing a bit of that top there so I'm just going to do that I like that that looks pretty good now what I'm going to do now one more thing I'm going to go up here into the graduated filter and I want to sort of feather the grass down the bottom here so what I'm going to do this go into exposure and drop it down a fairway so that I'm lightening sorry darkening off these corners we're going to do the same thing on this side yep I like to look at that so what I've actually done is made it so that that looks much more like there's a spotlight on the actual building I like that I think that looks absolutely fantastic so let's press F on the keyboard for full screen and there we have it there's our light painted final product Milky Way beautiful milky way over the top of our church with our 13 layers which I got rid of too so there's about 11 layers of light painting there but overall that's a beautiful looking image loved it so there you go I reckon that's a beauty now I love these old buildings like this and as you can see from this video I've put quite a bit of time and effort out in the field because I captured so many images to create the final blended image here but in the end you know it's worth it if I didn't capture all those frames out there I wouldn't have them to work with when I get back home now yeah you could say it's overkill with so many but I think you know you're there already so it doesn't take that much more effort to capture a few more and even if you don't use them all when you get back so anyway that's my installment of this episode comes to a close another in my tutorial on post-processing and I've got quite a few more coming on working I think the next one might be star trials don't hold me to that I've got one of those in the pipeline and I'm really looking forward to that because I love Star trials and you know the thing about start rods you can shoot them any time of the year you're not dependent on the Milky Way core making an appearance so if you'd like this video I'd love you to put a thumbs up or comment down below love chatting to you guys on the comments and the other thing is if you'd like to subscribe to my channel and they click the little bell icon down there you'll get notifications every time a new video comes up and I'm trying to keep them coming pretty hard and fast so I'll look forward to seeing you guys on the next one and until then hope you have a great time out under the stars wherever you may be I'll see you later [Music]

Channel: Nightscape Images

Views: 18,953

Keywords: Nightscape Images, Nightscape photography, Night photography, Photography tutorial, photography vlog, long exposure photography, Astrophotography, Light painting, Fine art light painting, Astro light painting, Photography road trip, Landscape photography, Australian photography, Milky way photography, Milky way editing, Milky way chaser

Id: TuKqyxKRJDA

Length: 29min 5sec (1745 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 09 2019