Photoshop TRICK: Easy Stacking for Silhouettes Video Lecture | Capture like a Pro: Digital Photography Tutorial - Professional Skills

For somebody who shoots both video and stills,
I am always looking to capture motion in my still images
and stills are still so much easier to capture and share.
So, I developed this easy and
quick post processing technique
to show the motion of a bird, flying through the sky
when it silhouetted.
and I promise, its so easy we
can do it in a couple of minutes.
First, when your taking the picture of the bird,
put your camera in continuous shooting mode.
Shoot with a wide angle
and then just hold the shutter down trying to keep the same framing.
Let the bird just fly through the frame.
You might just have to hang out
in a place where there are birds
and then just wait for them to come.
Just keep shooting and keep shooting, I must've taken
pictures of 20 different birds,
flying through the sky to settle
on these three different images.
Once you have that collection of
pictures, load them into Lightroom or
whatever and we're just going to open
them up as layers in Photoshop. So I've
just selected all these pictures I've
made all the changes I'm going to make
to the raw images just make the exact
same changes to all the same raw images,
then you right click -> Edit in -> and then
open as layers in Photoshop.
I've done that already so Photoshop here has all
the layers selected you can see
all these different pictures, if I hide this
top layer you can see the second below it.
I was hand holding this, you can see as
I switch between those two
images they don't quite line up
so I'm going to select all these layers, click the first,
shift-click the last and then Edi t -> Auto align layers.
Photoshop is now going to
think for a bit and then it's going to
align all those different layers up for
me. I'm still only going to see the top
photo once it's done though. Now that
Photoshops aligned everything, we can
see a slightly bigger picture and the
edges are a little uneven because it
just had to stack up all these different
pictures together. Now we're going to do
is to change the blending mode of these
layers. So this time I'm going to select
all the layers except for the bottom one,
so I'm clicking the top layer and then
I'm shift-clicking the next to last
layer. And now instead of the blending
mode here being Normal, I'm
going to set this to Darken.
And bam! suddenly we can see every shot that I took.
This works. It won't work
with every type of picture. This works
because it's a silhouette.
Stacking silhouettes is thus very very simple.
You could do this type of technique with any
picture but it would involve manually
using mattes to go in, but the fact that
it's a silhouette makes life very easy
for us. Now this picture is basically done.
You can hit 'C' to crop out the edges
here and in fact, in my final crop I
cropped it pretty tight, but I do want to
talk about the edge here. If you look
here in this edge you'll see a little
bit of kind of banding where Photoshop
has stacked them together and it's not
quite perfect. An easy way to fix that is,
if we look at the layer thumbnails here,
you can see I accidentally tracked the
moving bird so this top one, this top
layer, is over to the left and then at
the bottom I had shifted over to the
right a little bit. So to fix that I'm
going to duplicate this layer, let's call
it: 'the right edge' and then I'm going to
drag this all the way to the top, put it
there,
now you can see it hid all that other
stuff so what I'm going to do now is I'm
just going to add a layer mask to it. The
layer mask the term is which parts of
layer hidden or visible, the white parts
of the layer mask here mean this part of
the layer is visible that's hiding on
the lower layers. So, I'm going to use my
brush tool by hitting the 'B' key, make
sure I'm painting black and then, what I'm
going to do is I'm going to paint black
on this layer mask to reveal the lower
layers, right where the bird should be.
So this step is optional just an easy way
to... an easy way to repair the weirdness
that we had on the edge here. Now I can
just hit 'C' to crop and bring this in and
just crop it down to a reasonable amount,
let's set this ratio to good old 2x3.
(alright) enter and then to fill in this
lower corner you could use Content-Aware
fill or, I'm just going to actually this painted black
because it's pretty much already black.
That's it, that's a great way to show
motion in really just a few steps.
Stack them as layers and then use
the Darken blend mode if you want to
learn more about Photoshop, what do you know!
I have a book with 4 with 10 hours
of video in it, lots of sample files to
work with, lots of step-by-step
procedures that you can walk through and
learn tons and tons of tricks so check
it out. I also have a book on Adobe
Lightroom. They... like, you can get them
both, an electronic form, for 25 bucks
total. Check out our store and enjoy it!!
Subscribe, ask any questions. If you have any
other suggestions and stuff, write them
down in the comments. Bye!