THE TWISTED FOREST /Processing with Intent

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] okay now this is a continuation of last week's video if you haven't seen last week's I highly recommend that you watch that before you watch this and I'll leave a link up in the in the corner here now last week's video a number of people suggested that I try a program called Helicon focus for focus stacking and the reason being it was that I was having some problems with blurriness around some of the edges in my in my photograph and that was when I was focused stacking with Photoshop so I did download a free trial just to give it a go and I have to say that I am really impressed if i zoom in on the areas that I was having issues with you'll notice that there isn't any blurriness along the edges whatsoever and if there is any it's it's minimal I was I had quite a bit up here and around here and Helicon focus did a marvelous job so if you do want to try focus stacking I would highly recommend downloading the free trial just to give it a go and see how you make out with it I'll leave a link in the description below if you did watch last week's video you'll also notice that the version that I had or that I did with with Photoshop that the cobwebs disappeared and you'll notice that in this version the cobwebs are still there now there is a bit of ghosting in there but I'm just impressed that it's been able to pick up those very thin lines and keep them in in the in the file now I will probably clone out some of this area but it's extremely impressive so thanks again everybody for the the suggestion I really appreciate it okay so we have our file that we're going to work on in Photoshop I just wanted to show you a finished version that we'll be trying to duplicate actually now this is quite a departure from the original scene I'll be for the first to admit and I know that some of you you know don't like to do an awful lot of processing and I'm kind of a mixed bag some of my images I do quite a bit of processing and then others I do very minimal work on them so I'm open to both ways of thinking this was more of a rendition that I wanted to put together I kind of envisioned it when I when I took the photograph you may recall that I mentioned that I really wanted to darken this area and the reason being is that if I show the original file here there isn't any interest down here whatsoever so why why have it in the photograph and actually when you look at this image your eye kind of pops from this area over to here which is not what what I really want I want the viewers attention to be drawn to this central portion the same goes with this area over here it's actually quite busy and there's some distractions there so again I really wanted to darken that area you'll also notice that the brightest areas are where your eye tends to go too and those are the areas that I found the most interesting in the scene I really loved the the curvature of these these branches coming down but they also kind of mimicked the trees in the background and we have a kind of a web of branches kind of meandering through the whole scene and eventually draws you right to this pinpoint of light at the background there and that was the whole purpose of taking the photograph if I show the original again you'll notice that all of those elements are there but what I've done is I've processed that process the image in such a way that I really want to draw people or the viewers attention to those specific areas like these trees over here I mean they're all part of the image but they're not the most interest part of the scene the whole interest was the the branches and the way that they kind of mimicked each other throughout the whole scene so why don't we jump right into Photoshop and and get started with this this photograph okay now I've opened up the file in in Photoshop and this image I really want to be quite Moody and dark not that I was in a in a dark mood at the time but it just has that quality to it so the first thing I'm going to do is go over to the curves and I'm going to darken this considerably some of it will be too dark enough I'll just brighten it up a little bit later so I'm just going to bring the curves way way down to about there I think okay we're just going to close that okay and then I'm going to open up a levels layer and I'm just going to zoom in on the very background here to 100% so we'll see what that looks like if I brighten it up even more so it gets quite bright but there's not a heck of a lot of detail back there anyway and it's so small in the frame probably clipped a little bit bring it to there and then the blacks just have a quick look of the blacks here it's gonna flatten out the image a little bit so I'm going to bring the blacks in on the bar here see we can just see a little bit of detail in there okay let's just zoom out and have a look at that okay okay now I'm going to start off by dodging and burning a little bit in here especially in the corners here now I want to burn these in now what we you would usually do is you just make a separate layer and go to this little menu here and go down to soft soft light and then change your brush color to black and go into the paint brush but I use that the tawny kuiper control panel I just find it much quicker so all I do before want to burn and dodge is use these two tabs here so I'm just going to burn so you just press on the hand and you notice all of a sudden there's a layer up here has soft light and the brush is already picked and it's already black all I have to do is change the opacity or the flow now some people will keep the opacity at 100 percent and reduce the flow so you build up slowly I generally I don't know I guess it's just a habit that I've got into I like to keep the opacity at 10% and build it up that way either way works whatever you use to so as I've said in my previous video I wanted to burn this area in and I want to burn it in considerably so this is because this area here isn't terribly interesting so just keep burnin that in and this area here because we have all these distractions like sticks and and old logs and and stuff that doesn't really add to the photograph this area here I want to keep the light on this branch but this section here I want to darken it a little bit because it tends to be drawing the viewers eye out of the frame which is not what we want so rather than going up here and typing thirty forty percent and doing it really quickly I like to do things gradually and slowly build the mob just because it I just seem to have a bit more control and it's just easier for me to see what's what's happening Angele and if i press on the the little eye here i can kind of see my my progress so i'm just gonna burn this in a little bit and then we'll go on to the the next section okay now I've made two layers of burning where I've burnt in the the edges of the frame just to hide the distractions now in previous videos I've talked about how light and dark attract and detract from certain areas and so I guess with this image I gotta define what it is I want to portray so what do I want to kind of draw people's attention to and what do I want to draw people's attention from so and also go with kind of what the natural light was doing in the first place so you'll notice that this branch here has some natural light on it up here we have a little bit of natural light on this branch here and this one here a little bit on here and along here but some of these areas have light on them that I don't necessarily want there because they don't want to draw attention to those areas so I think what I'm going to do first is I'm going to brighten these these areas here and start playing with the the dodging burning so I'm going to go with a Dodge tool here so it's just made an extra layer I pick a white paint brush if you want to change the paint brush you just push X on your keyboard take a white black white black and gonna go with 10% again and make sure we're on brush just make this brush just a little bit bigger hardness I'm going to keep it zero and I'm just going to start painting in these areas here so this area here now this is going to be quite dramatic probably more so than it would naturally happen in the real world but you know this is kind of a somewhat of a bit of a fantasy only a fantasy land but it's uh I don't know it's just kind of a vision that I had in my mind at the time and I kind of just want to go with that okay so if I click on the eye here you'll see that I've bind that up considerably so just gonna make another dodge layer here to zoom in a bit I want to brighten up this section here so we just go on brush just reduce the size a little bit and I'm just going to start painting in this section here no doesn't matter if you go over the edges we can sort that out afterwards if if need be I'm also going to paint this section in here because I quite like these roots here they kind of zigzag across the frame here this is where the path was was leading through the woods there this is all part of the the Juan de Fuca trail this is actually the end of the trail the trail itself it's 47 kilometers long it starts of China Beach and ends at actually at Botany Bay near port renfrew I have done the trail some friends and I ran it actually I guess it would mean two or three years ago now took us quite a long time because there wasn't an awful lot of running because it's so routine and like this and muddy so we walked a lot of it but we did we did finish it in the day if I was due to do it today I'd probably have a hard time because I'm I'm really out of shape [Laughter] alright so I'm gonna keep painting some of these areas so let's just have a look at that so you can see it's slowly brightening up and and that's what it's all about it's to slowly build these areas up so I'm just gonna finish this this dodging because I don't want this video to go on and on and then I'll show you what I did with the dodging when I'm when I'm all finished okay okay I'll be the first to admit that processing this image for a second time is much harder than the first time trying to try and to match the the original intention is as much harder than I thought but I'm working on it so I've done a couple more dodge layers this one here and you can see how much dodging I've actually done quite quite a bit and when you click it like that it looks very unnatural but I've tried to follow along with the the natural path of light except for this tree here this here it's kind of key to the composition and it was quite dark so I've brightened that up considerably so if I unclick each of these you can kind of see the progression from the original and it's quite drastic so we've got the curves bit of levels burning in another burn layer dodging another dodge layer and then another and I might be even brighten up some more areas but what I want to concentrate on next is contrasts now contrast kind of gives you that three dimensional look that you want in a photograph if that's what you're after so we have bright areas and dark areas and good contrast in-between and if you put a dark area next to a bright area then that's where you're going to get that illusion of contrast and depth so this area here I'm going to darken up quite a bit and in here and then where I've lined up the trees I would like to darken up those areas too so there's a couple of ways I can do that I can either just dodge and burn or I can try a luminosity mask so why don't I do something a little bit different I'll try a luminosity mask here now this panel here has a bunch of different tabs on it and these are the mid-tones highlights and dark areas and these areas here are probably in the mid-tones so let's just click five just kind of see what what kind of mask we might end up getting you'll notice that if I put a curves layer on this then anything that's bright or white will be affected quite a lot and then anything that's dark will be affected very little so the area that I wanted a dark was actually adjust it was actually in here and you'll notice that there's quite a bit of dark areas and the highlights the brightest areas and that's not really what I want so I'm going to go down to this area here number three and now all of a sudden you'll notice that although the light areas of the brain areas are black or dark and all the the darker areas are light and that's kind of what I'm after maybe not quite that much let's see here okay I'm gonna try this one here okay so if I go down to my channels here it says wrapping mask if I just click on this circle here all of a sudden it'll make a mask of all those areas and I can click on the RGB now I want to get rid of the marching ants or just click command H or control H and that gets that just hides them and then I'm going to make a curves layer and you'll notice that the curves are very much the peak is very much in the center here and that's good so hopefully it'll just affect these area so I want to darken it so I'm going to pull the line down and you'll see that it's darkened this area these areas quite a bit but it hasn't really affected the highlights too too much you see that now if it has affected areas that you don't want affected what you can do is you can just paint in the areas with the mask so let's we'll go to about there and if we click on the mask and then be for brush and pick up a black paint we can just paint over the areas that we don't want affected by that curves layer and just go up to here we've got to 100% and you'll notice that all of a sudden we get those areas that we we dodge they'll they'll come back it's just reduce the brush here so I'm just painting over the areas that I don't want darkened that makes sense this tree here all right let's see how that looks so it has darkened the areas that we want darkened and most of the areas that we want to stay bright have more or less stayed bright okay now I want to brighten up these areas just a little bit more make it a little bit more dramatic so what I'm going to do is rather than dodge and burn all of them I'm going to try and make an adjustment layer that's a little bit more accurate so what I'm going to do here is pick curves and I'm just going to zoom in on this area here and what I'd like to do is pinpoint some areas that I want affected and some that I don't want to affect this under lit just click on the hand here and click on the shadowed areas those are the areas that I don't really want to fix it and you'll notice that as I click you notice that there's these little pin points along the line there now the area that I want to brighten is this area here and you'll notice as I have my eyedropper on that area the the ball will go up and down that light and that's the tone along the line there so if I just hold my mouse down you'll notice the hand comes up with the arrows and as I raise it up or down it'll brighten the bright areas but it won't affect the the shadows now I don't want to do it too much so I'm just going to raise the line just and you'll see that it's brained up all the bright areas on the whole image now I might not necessarily want all of them brighten up just some of them so we'll just close that for a sec and we'll just zoom out and you'll notice also that this is creating quite a bit more contrast in the whole overall effect of the photograph which is not necessarily what I want it also increases the saturation in the colors which is not really what I want either so what I'm going to do is click on the mask here and I'm just going to in invert that so command I or control I on a PC so now you're you're pretty much hiding the effects that you've done I'm going to click on paintbrush or B for brush X to change the color so I want it to white and let's go with 30% so just press 3 and that'll change your passivity to 30 and I'm just going to paint along the bits that I want to affect it and you'll notice as I paint on those bright areas they should be the only ones that are affected so and if you can see that let's just zoom in a little bit more here so you can get a better idea what's happening here see and I mean basically I'm just going to paint along the edges of the trees here so we'll just it's quite a dramatic effect but I really like it it's really emphasized these curves that's just a really neat area now I don't necessarily want to affect this area here so if I do happen to go over I can just change the color of the the paintbrush to black and then just paint that in your white again also this foliage here thus allow I've kind of brightened it up a little bit on the edges on the top here just to make it look more translucent like the lights coming kind of from behind it even though it wasn't really the light is actually coming from above so would catch a little bit of light alright let's just zoom out and have a look at that overall effect so it's quite subtle but it's definitely bright in those areas up okay now then the contrast is getting a little bit high for my liking so what I'm going to do here is just I'm going to open up a levels layer here and I'm just going to flatten this out a little bit and the way you would do that if you wanted to add contrast then you'd pull the line over of the blacks over to the right here but you'll notice that there's a bar here that goes from black to white if you pull that over then it flattens out the the whole image now it certainly don't wanna flatten out too much just a little little bit and it will actually flatten out the whole image so it's reducing the contrast quite a bit I mean there are other ways you can do it this is just a quick and easy way of doing it looks okay okay now I'm just gonna add another burn layer so just click on that little hand here and what I want to do here is just how to add a little bit more contrast between the bright areas and the dark areas and the tree here trees here so I want to create make this area here a little darker so I'm just gonna zoom in and make sure I'm on brush just to brush the size here make sure that I met around 10% and I'm just gonna start brushing this in now to make this go a little bit quicker what I often do is just click in an area and then click on the the shift key and then all just kind of a lazy way of doing it naturally and you'll notice that I've just darkened the whole side of the tree there this area here I'm going to darken a little bit more so we'll just click in there and I'm holding down the shift key here just to darken off that the whole area and then this area here now I don't want to overdo it because then it just starts to look a bit too fake and on the side of this tree here so again I'm just holding the shift key and then it's just doing the whole tree that's probably enough this tree here gonna darken this area here now the the cobweb I decided just to leave it as it is I might clone that out later I'm not sure it doesn't doesn't look too bad actually it's kind of a natural feature don't want to overdo it otherwise then your images just start to look too static and and just too perfect if you you know control every single little detail you know sometimes it's not a bad idea to leave a few flaws in there that's my feeling anyway okay we're just darkening areas that are already dark we're just creating a little bit more definition between the darks and the lights now I'm going to just brighten up that little area there so I'm just going to go back down to this dodge layer here and change over to white and we're just gonna buying up that little area there a bit there we go and here all right let's have a look at that it's shaping up pretty good I think we're almost done I'll probably clone out this little section up here I could just leave it it's not a huge distraction the next thing that I'll probably do is just add a little bit of Goergen blur perhaps a little more blur in the background here just to kind of give it that misty feel and and that's pretty much done okay I'm think I'm pretty much done with the dodging and burning I have this area is nice and dark but you could still see the shapes of the trees and I've really tried to emphasize the trees in here your eye is drawn to this area here perhaps this could be just a little bit darker but I'm going to leave it for now so the next step for me there's a couple of things I'd like to do the first thing is is I want to create a little bit more I guess you'd say a misty effect in the back here not too much that I don't want to overdo it and one of the ways you can achieve that is by creating a separate layer and then up here we're going to go down to linear dodge add and pick your fief brush and make the brush quite small hardness is set to zero and make sure that I'm I'm on with the white paint and ten percent again and I'm just gonna click little areas here and you'll notice that all of a sudden the contrast is reduced and it creates somewhat of a misty effect now don't worry if you do it too much because you can always reduce the effect by just changing the opacity we're just going to lower that a little bit the reason why I'm doing this is because the fog wasn't there if it'd been there I wouldn't bother with this so I'm cheating creating my own fog all right let's see here yeah I like it I like it okay so now I'm going to stamp this and make a copy layer of the whole thing so the way you do that is shift alt or option command or ctrl + E and you'll notice that that that makes a copy of everything that you've done now what I'd like to do is go to filter and Gorge and blur now I realize this is not a fact that everybody likes and I don't do it on every single image that I have but some images I kind of like to do it I like I kind of like the the dreamy effect but you can overdo it and I have overdone it in the past so okay so no once once I've done that I want to create a brightness and contrast layer and just click on this little box here so you're just affecting that one spot and then you kind of do it to taste now I I generally bring up the brightness up quite a bit and the contrast but I think on this one I might actually bring the contrast down because I don't want the image to contrast II and there we go we're done right and then what you can do from there is command or control and click both layers and ctrl G or command G and that'll make it into a group and then just get the opacity and slowly bring it down to taste now I generally as I've said in my past videos go around 17 I quite like the effect at 17 so it's and that's what I usually use but sometimes you go a little bit lower it also reduces the contrast quite a bit as well now on this group layer what I'm going to do is I'm going to put a mask on that so that's the rectangle with the circle in it and I want to paint some of this effects out because I don't want it on everything especially the foreground because generally when you look at a scene it gets hazy ER and hazy ER the further you go back so the foreground is generally quite sharp and crisp and clear so again I'm going to pick B for brush X or change the color over here black and I'm going to go with I don't know let's go with around 40% and then I'm just going to start painting in this area here that I don't want affected so what's happening here is you're just masking out the effect that you just put on there and we just keep circling around okay let's see how that looks so you can see it's more or less just affected and it's kind of softened the center up a little bit it's not quite as harsh which is kind of the effect that I want I'm just gonna paint around here as well I don't want actually want it on any of the foreground here so I'm just gonna I guess I could just go up to 100% but okay and then you know if you want to adjust that the the brightness and the contrast you can still do that if you want to experiment you could just because only going to effect the blurry blurry layer and she I quite like it with the brightness down okay I'll just leave it there like that for now all right okay something else that I've been doing lately is I've been warming my my images up a little bit how the easiest way is just use a photo filter now if you use a TK control panel there's a button here for a filter you just click on the button and the photo filter will just automatically come up and put the filter on for you now if you don't have that then you can click on the background layer just go to image adjustments and look up photo filter and you'll see here that we have a bunch of different filters 85 81 I mean the 81 a used to be the the warming filter of choice in the film days and I used to use the 81 a all the time 85 was a little bit strong but I think I'm gonna go with an 81 and then just bring it down just a little bit because it's just a bit too orange for my liking just a tad and if I click on preview you can see that it's just warmed it up just a little bit and then from there something else that I've been doing lately obviously this is just a personal preference I've been saturating my image is quite a bit not everything but I don't know I just tend to like them quite muted that's just a phase I'm going through I guess so she's got a hue/saturation and I'm just gonna universally bring the saturation down a little bit not too much I mean this is probably looked really good in black and white actually about that it looks fine and and that's that's pretty much it you know if I was doing this on my own and not recording this and I might finesse a few things a little bit more as I said this is the second time I've done this so it's you know it's lost its appeal a little bit because I only like to do things once so and actually I have the other the first version here and you can see that actually is quite a bit redder which actually I don't like I actually like the the new version so that's a good thing so if I click on all of these layers here and make them into a group so that's command G or ctrl G on a PC you can see it's it's quite a departure from my original file but it turned out just the way I like it and I'm sticking with that alright everybody whew that was a long one you know most of the time the images that I process I don't go into them this much occasionally I get inspired to you know work on an image and do something a little bit different and this scene I really I really really did enjoy photographing it and and processing it and going through the whole you know the whole process with you so I hope you learned something from this it's funny my videos I've noticed that whenever I talk about gear or processing it's when I get the most thumbs down it's funny how things work out the way a lot of people have their own opinions about gear and processing the thing is it's just to stick to what you really want to do with your photographs you know at the end of the day it's what really matters is what you want and what what you want to portray in your own photography and that's kind of the line that I take try not to be influenced by other people out there and what they're doing because just because something is popular doesn't make it right so I'll leave you there I hope you enjoyed this video if you did be sure to give me a thumbs up and I'll I'll catch you in the next video thanks for so much for watching again everybody and I'll catch next time all right [Music] [Music]

Channel: Adam Gibbs

Views: 21,632

Keywords: landscape photography tips and techniques, landscape photography, landscape photography tips, landscape photography composition, nature photography tips and tricks, nature photography, image processing tutorials, lightroom tutorial, photoshop tutorial, using luminosity masks, orton effect, photo processing tutorial, photo processing photoshop, lightroom classic, dodging, adam gibbs, adam gibbs photography, adam gibbs processing

Id: t8fcqUDDx48

Length: 39min 43sec (2383 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 25 2018