Orton Effect for Street Photography - A Step By Step Tutorial

if you are from the landscape photography world you probably would have heard of a term or an effect called the Alton effect it was coined by a guy called Michael Alton back in the 1980s and in its simplest form it's a technique where you use different versions of the same image combine them blend them together to create one final piece you will have three versions of the same image the first one is completely normal but you would be happy with as it is second one is a heavily bird outer version of the same image and the third is a let's say high contrast version of this photo when I say high contrast I mean to the point where it doesn't look even natural and then when you put those three together into one piece and you manipulate it in the right way you can have some interesting results now when it comes to street photography I use this personally for any image where you have a lot of detail a lot of information like markets busy places but also and more frequently it's used when you have various bright sources of light so for instance if you imagine a dark let's say Street with bright neon lights you can use this effect to create a nice hazy glow around that light and then you use it selectively as I will show you later in the video now to create this look all we need is a piece of software that allows us to use layers blend modes and masks so if you are working on the desktop or an iPad you can have Photoshop or affinity photo if you're working on a mobile like an iPhone or an Android you can have an app called Pixelmator which does the same thing and the best thing about this it's not just limited to photos later on we'll jump into Final Cut and I'll show you how you can create this for your video as well now before jumping into Photoshop let me give you a couple of little tips which will help you get the most out of this effect so the first one is if you are already using negative clarity in editing let's say during your Lightroom editing stage may I suggest you reset that to zero before actually exporting it into Photoshop the reason for that is because this Orton effect already adds a whole load of softening to the image and if your image is already too soft then this might not work as well so reset it to zero and then export it into Photoshop and finally this effect is not a replacement for good lighting if your image is badly lit don't expect this to turn it into a masterpiece sure it will make a difference and in some cases it can turn a boring image into a slightly less boring image but ultimately light is still key as in capturing good light while you're there and this only helps you sort of exaggerate that light and make it look a little bit better all right let's jump into the first image and this one is from New York it was back in January just before the world imploded and going affected and it's in Chinatown looking down from Manhattan Bridge at night I like this picture because of the contrast with the bright lights the guy in there makes the picture quite well also the traffic lights I really like so what we're going to do here is we're gonna use this effect to just soften the lights make the lights look a bit more hazy and just bring them out a little bit if you do have your own photos which are similar to this then please do open them up right now pause the video and follow along so the first thing we want to do is we want a duplicate at the background layer always duplicate it because that's just sort of backup if you mess it up you can always delete and start again without having to close and all of that now that you've duplicated the layer the next step is to convert it for Smart Filters Smart Filters basically means that if you want to change any parameters of a Edit on that layer you can go back and change it if you don't have Smart Filters enabled it means any changes of permanent personally for this effect I don't use Smart Filters because I know roughly where I want to have my settings to get a certain look however if you're just starting out I would say use smart filters because that gives you the room to experiment with you know how far you can push different settings and what they would look like so to convert it for Smart Filters you select the layer go to filter convert for Smart Filters click OK and you're done now the next step is to add some blood so we go to filter blur and Gaussian blur now in terms of the amount of blur to add if you're in Photoshop generally about halfway down the slider is sufficient however if you don't have a slider my role is look at the image the details should be blurred however overall you could still understand what the image is about so for example I know this looks like a city with lights not a beach click OK and you're done and now if you see here you've got the smart filter there so you can go back and change it the next step is to add contrast specifically a levels adjustment which will allow you to either completely blow out the highlights or completely crush the blacks now you can create a new layer if you wish however personally I think it's much more straightforward to use the same layer especially if you've got these smart filters enabled so to do that click layer at the bottom click on the adjustments and then go to levels ok once you've got levels if we drag this sides of the left side the blacks go down if we drag the other side all the whites come up effectively you want to start with the whites especially if you've got light sources you don't really need to darken this image anymore so start with the right hand side so with the whites and you just want to drag it to the point where let's say all the main light sources are completely blown out that should do it and then take the black slider on the left and just slightly counteract the fact that the darker parts of the image are now brighter so effectively you should end up with a very blurry very like blown out image that looks something like this the next step is to combine all of this into one layer so on a Mac you do command option shift e that takes all of the layers below and languages them into one after that we simply turn off the to mental layers so the adjustment layers using the I button and then we've just got the original and the current original and current obviously we're not done so now onto how to make this work there are two ways you can do globally or you can do it locally also you can play with blend modes and you can play with opacity so the first thing to do is start with opacity and effectively you want to keep it below 20 the way I'll normally do it is take the slider and drop it all the way to zero then slowly start to introduce it now if you see a 15% it's already making a nice difference to the image now if you think yeah it's good but it's a bit too strong what you can do is you can take the blend mode and change it to overlay this adds a bit more contrast adds a bit more punch and just takes away a bit of the blurriness out so if you find that the scene is naturally blurry and this is a good blending mode to use to just reduce that now for this particular image I actually think that the normal blend mode works really well and I don't think overlays quite necessary here because it wasn't a super soft image to start with now you can either leave it as a global adjustment if you're happy or you can do a little bit more and just and it locally this is ideal if there are parts of the image which already soft and you'd own the soften them anymore or if there's just a particular light source that you want to soften how do we do that what's very straightforward first of all select the uppermost layer the one that you have squished and the one that's got the low opacity click on the mask button just at the bottom click on the mask click be for brush now with brushes white paint the effect and black takes it away what you can do though is well click on the layer on this on the mask layer sorry if you press command I that inverts that mask so now you actually paint this effect in rather than take it away make sure the white brush is selected and slowly start to paint this in and as you can see I am now painting this effect just into the light sources and we can completely forget the really bright areas that are not required to have this effect so if I just you know it's a very quick job just for this video but let's assume we're finished and we're happy with this so now if I turn it off turn it on/off on it's only impacted that part of the image cool that's the first example I've got two more examples I'll go for them a little bit quicker but hopefully it will give you a better understanding of what I'm doing okay let's jump into the second one if this one I'll go a little bit quicker but hopefully you now have an idea of what I'm doing and you can follow along so background layer command J duplicate it and go filter work for Smart Filters okay next up filter Gaussian blur bat middle that's about right okay then go down the bottom levels now for this one I think we'll need a bit more of an even contrast let's just bring the blacks down and because we've got a direct source of light we can really really sort of push that like so to really exaggerate that light okay um I'm cool with that command option shift e to squish it all into one into one layer and then take it capacity zero and slowly introduce it okay that's 23 so on this one I would say generally keeping it under 20% is suitable for 99% of applications now even though here the light looks good if you actually look at a building in the top right it looks too soft it just doesn't look right so for this one we definitely need to mask it out mask command I to invert click a big brush for this one make sure it's white and just slowly paint it just slowly paint just the light source hitting the truck and maybe just the edge right here okay and now if we go before after before after you can see it's created a really nice exaggerated soft light look even black and white images cool for the next one we're going to actually jump into my phone and I'll show you how to do this in an app called Pixelmator which will effectively create the same sort of thing cool so now that we're in the Pixelmator app we can open the photo and if you tap just on the right side of the screen sorry the left side of the screen you will get the layers tab so tap that hold lay up so press the layer press duplicate select the top layer and then go into the brush sort of settings then go add effects and click blow and we want to just increase the blur to about 50% like so press apply then press done now with the same layer selected go to the brush again this time go to adjust colors slide over until you get to the levels section and here to be honest it's going to be quite even contrast so we'll bring the blacks down until they're all completely black bring the whites up until the sky is quite blown out not too much it just looks like a completely over contrast the image click apply now press the top layer go to the edge click format and here you've got the blending options so select capacity bring it to zero and then slowly introduce it back to about 20 20% get rid of that and you're done so if I hold that so if I go to that and click hide it looks like that it's like click show it looks like that I think on the phone it's just a bit more difficult to really understand what changes you're making because the screen is so small I mean this is an iPhone 11 plus at the big one and even on this I am struggling just to understand the difference I'm making to the image I can see it but I don't appreciate it as much as I would let's say on the laptop or an iPad or something like that right that's all the photo examples and as I said you can do this in video so let's jump into Final Cut and I'll show you how to do that all right so now that we're in Final Cut let's get going first things first take a clip of your choosing and drag it onto the timeline this is a quick one from London from a video did a while back let me just trim it so that we're not stuck rendering the whole thing to be honest not the best clip in the world but it does the job for this first things fire stock in Photoshop duplicate the layer as in to placate the clip so command C move to the end command V and take the second clip and drag it on the top so now effective really we've got our two layers or two Clips select the top one then go into blur so under the settings on the right hand side if you click below click Gaussian blur and then it will apply the Gaussian blur to the top clip 50 is a bit too much of things so let me just reduce that ever so slightly I would say about 25 looks okay now that we've done that the next up is is the exposure so go to color color board double-click on color board and then effectively this is your levels so under exposure on the color board drop the blacks until let's say you got pitch black increase the whites until you got sort of blown out highlights again the principle is the same as with your photos the only difference here is unless you using like a red camera or something ridiculous these are not going to hold up as well as your photos so keep that in mind that these files will fall apart quicker if it's for like a normal DSLR phone mirrorless camera anyway now that we've done that effect through we've got a very high contrast version like we did in Photoshop and the next step go into the properties of that clip make sure the clip selected go under compositing you'll see blend mode and you'll see opacity identical to how it's and find the shop take the opacity drop it down to zero very slowly you then start to introduce it back until let's say about 1514 looks ok and now if I turn it off on off now if you want to apply this selectively in Final Cut at least you can use masks similar to fight shop just not as straight forwards also gonna have to remember things like key framing and all the complicated stuff that comes with video honestly speaking I don't really use this for video and if I do I'll probably make a video on that video as to how of keyframe this effect if I ever go down that route in the future but for now that's it so I hope you found this tutorial useful hope you manage to follow along with it of course if you have questions write them down below I will be glad to get back to you and if you have your own effects if you have your own ideas please write them below if you have any suggestions for editing videos please write them down I mean I'm not going out anytime soon I'm gonna be stuck indoors for a while so if I can help you with editing in some way I'll be glad to do it right thank you have a good day hope you're safe hope you're doing well hope you're going on toilet paper and I'll see you in the next one bit

Channel: Roman Fox

Views: 19,922

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Id: U86pX_V1_1g

Length: 17min 19sec (1039 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 02 2020