Glamour Photoshoot: Behind-the-Scenes & Photoshop Video Lecture | Capture like a Pro: Digital Photography Tutorial - Professional Skills

in this video we'll be showing you how
to make the picture that we put on the
cover of her Photoshop book the first
step that I took was finding a model I
wanted to work with someone that I'd
never used before so I found Emily and
began training her now we had our model
we had to actually plan the shoot this
was going to be a book cover so I knew
the photo would need a lot of negative
space for the title of the book and
other words the printer also needs some
room to crop for a full bleed print like
this I also needed to be able to go
either horizontally or vertically
because the book of herself was going to
be vertical but if I was going to show
it in videos I would need to be able to
go to sixteen by nine horizontal and
that kind of heavy crop requires a lot
of megapixels because the picture would
appear on her Photoshop book we wanted
to showcase the benefits of using heavy
post-processing and more complex editing
techniques I learned how to make a
beautiful flowing dress by making a comp
from Sarah Bowman who wrote a blog for
us on our blog of Northrop dot photo so
now for location scouting and a test
shot I wanted a nice simple clean
background so we went to Harkness a park
which has these big rolling hills but
when I went there it was foggy like
really really foggy
I knew that we wouldn't be able to
recreate the shot because we just
wouldn't be able to get the same weather
again but I figured it'd be great to
just get sample shots anyway and figure
out any difficulties that may arise
while comping the dress so I ran home
and I threw on a red dress that I
already had
because Tony wouldn't volunteer to wear
it we liked the shape of the trees in
the fog and we chose a composition that
had just a single tree in the frame and
at the time the sort of stark
composition seemed great but just in
case I rotated the camera around and
kind of got a panorama of all the other
trees in the scene because it's better
to have too many shots and too many
options than not enough
I tried a few different poses and I also
tried posing close to the camera and
farther away even though it's going to
be a comp you have to make sure that you
get the picture as perfect as possible
in camera so we had to look at our
histogram and make sure that everything
was exposed properly now standard meter
and kind of failed us the picture was
underexposed by two-and-a-half stops
because there was so much white fog it
was exposing for that so we had to bump
up our exposure compensation and try
again proper metering and shooting raw
will minimize the noise in your picture
and also provide nice natural bright
colors after standing in for the shots
Chelsea changed out of her dress and
went back to her position where she'd
made a mark and flapped the dress in the
wind now it's really important for this
type of shot to be in kind of exactly
the same place and time if you're going
to do a comp like this because well it's
easy to move objects around it's really
hard to simulate different lighting
conditions and different angles and
different shadows so we had to really be
in exactly the same spot at the same
time the original shot that I had
planned was pretty stark it didn't end
up looking as nice as I had hoped that
it would so instead I Compton some trees
in the background at that point I knew
it was just a practice shot so I tried
all different things just to get the
experience accompt in a crow and a few
other elements just having fun overall
I'm really glad that I took practice
shots first I learned a lot about the
dress a lot about what comps well into a
picture and what doesn't so I would
recommend that before you take your
final shot you also take some practice
shots
we felt ready for the shoot so we
scheduled Emily right before sunrise so
we could get 20 to 30 minutes of good
light we hadn't actually successfully
scouted a location because of the fog
so we had to make our decision on the
spot we needed a spot with visible
horizon and needed to be just a
completely clean background so we went
down to the beach
our test shots of the first location
didn't look great there's a lot of sand
in the foreground but the sand was also
pitted and not very smooth it was a
distraction from our subject Emily so
instead we moved down by the shore where
the sand was naturally smoothed by the
water and got better shots there
redeposition Emily said the Sun was to
the photographer's back so that the Sun
would be shining directly on her and
illuminating that dress we also had to
have her facing into the wind so that as
the wind interacted with her dress would
look natural when we later flapped it to
simulate additional wind was cold like
right about freezing and because we
needed nice clean and smooth sand Emily
had to be right where the water would be
slapping against her feet she was really
cold and we did everything we could to
get her in and out of that position as
fast as possible modeling can look
really glamorous but it's often really
very uncomfortable our first shot of
Emily was taken at 9:21 and our last one
was taken at 9:26 just to give you an
idea of how short that was all of that
planning and her model only had to be
there for five minutes it was cold so we
kind of rushed it along for her but
after Emily changed out of the dress and
went home Toni and I stayed there I
flapped around a dress and got more
dress pictures in the right positions
and then of course we still had all the
editing to do now that you've seen a
behind the scenes of the photo shoot I'm
going to show you the basics of comping
the dress a lot of photo shop went into
my final image it took me hours and
hours so I'm not going to show all of
that I'll show you how I chose each
piece and what I think are the most
important elements of constructing the
dress so first you want to pick an image
your final image the pose that you liked
the most the one that you think is going
to work with your edits I liked Emily's
upper body here her legs were together
so I chose a different lower body for
her I'm not going to go into all that
that's kind of besides the point of it
you can see she didn't look too happy so
I added a different pose
and I happen to be in this picture
pulling back the dress because I wanted
it to look more natural with the wind
blowing this worked a little bit and it
would have worked better had I had a
different fabric but because the dress
wasn't very well constructed you can see
all these ripples happened along the
seam and it ended up looking really
unnatural
had it been tulle or more flowing
forgiving fabric it would have worked
out better first thing I'm going to do
is Photoshop myself out I just wanted to
show you like that I can be pretty
sneaky back there holding dresses and
things the next thing that I did was go
through all of my pictures of flapping
the dress around you can see here and I
tried to find the ones that would best
line up with the natural flow of the
dress and once you find the pictures
that you like I use the quick select
tool because I was using the color
bright red it was very easy to select
you can do refine edges and then I just
smooth them a bit
to it on white going on here my screen
is different than usual because we have
it set up down here so that it's bigger
so that it's easier for you to read but
that can be a bit of a problem for me
okay so I'm going to shift my edges you
might want to take more time doing this
then I'll copy up control C and I drop
it into my final image and then you want
to align it with the flow of the dress
as I said so I already had pieces
selected I just wanted to show you how I
dropped them in and now I'll show you
the pieces that I chose
so this main flowing piece was the first
one that I put in and you can see that I
aligned it oops wrong where I aligned it
with the natural shadows and creases on
her body there was already a crease here
so I just kind of erased where it was
and I put it up near the bodice of her
dress because that's a natural line that
would be falling out so right now this
was a little bit more form-fitting
around her lower back and I edited it
differently than that actually changed
the design of the dress a bit because
the dress would be more flowing had it
been cut differently so I made that
decision in post to do it that way
I'm going to choose this layer mask here
kind of deconstructing the edits bit and
I'll show you
what this looked like before so this was
the cutout of the dress I overlapped it
I enlarged it by going to edit free
transform you can go like that and that
way it was the size that I wanted it to
be when it was flowing and then you use
your layers mask to remove whatever
fabric you don't want there so I can
show you how that's done so here you can
see it looks like it's wrapped around
her and instead I want it to flow into
the dress more so I lower my opacity and
make sure it's off of this part of the
dress here I blend it in with the
natural shadows there's a natural crease
here so I want that to show up and I'm
going to make my brush bigger lower the
opacity make sure it's not very hard and
just kind of blend it in like that so
that's how I did that one thing there
was a lot of trial and error I'm sure
that you get better at this as you
experiment more but this was only the
first time that I done wanted these
dress comps and so it took a lot of
practice so after I got this first big
flowing piece of fabric that I wanted I
realized that you can see here these
wrinkles are going almost directly to
the left this part of the fabric is
flowing down so I wanted to find
something a bottom part of the dress
that flowed more into this important
piece here so I went back through my
pictures I put Lightroom on one part of
the computer Photoshop on the other part
and just kind of eyeball that to see
what what piece would line up with her
dress I ended up deciding that this
pulled fabric that I was pulling didn't
really fit and I ended up finding a
photo where the wind was more naturally
taking the fabric so this is this piece
here
and if I take that away you can see what
it looks like so I'm going to shift that
around just you can see it's a shadow on
her leg which I wanted it's a natural
ripple of the fabric which I liked and
then it just goes forward like that so
if you were to be editing this picture
you might say okay these two pieces
blend together very well but now there's
this empty part here and this piece
doesn't really look great let's see so I
added another piece of fabric that goes
behind that one so it looks like behind
this fold there's a more natural moving
piece of fabric so let me hide these two
layers so you can see this one
and I think that that would have been
okay but I wanted a piece peeking out
from underneath her feet here so I added
something to that and one more to cover
up this I thought this looked ugly and I
don't even think that's part is comped
but I thought that it looked comped so I
added in something else you may have to
blur the dresses in some parts our
f-stop number was pretty large so we had
a lot of depth of field so that wasn't
really a problem but if you have a
shallower depth of fields you're going
to want to just kind of blur and you may
may even have to blur the edges here to
blend in the edits one more thing to
remember people freak out about shadows
so you have to make sure that you put
your shadows in here I had low long
light you can see her shadow is very
small and it's going directly to her
right so there's not actually a shadow
underneath her but if the dress were out
here there would be a shadow let's say
about here so once I got the dress the
way that I wanted it I took all of these
edits I merged my layers and I brought
them into a whole different file so this
is my final image here and I added
clouds and all sorts of things and
that's why I'm not going over these
because it's just so in-depth and maybe
not the style that you want I added a
few other things I added this splash
here to add more movement to the photo
just took that from a different picture
and I got rid of the shadow on her face
by merging two photos I mean if you're
going to be working in Photoshop all day
you may as well get it perfect right and
then I used a curves layer to create the
shadow underneath her dress so you go
into here
select curves and I actually this is
counterintuitive but I brought them up
to light in the foam and then I use the
mask to take away those curves
everywhere that I wanted a shadow and
you can see that here so it's still a
natural color of the foam but you're
getting a shadow my biggest advice to
you is to keep practicing selecting each
part of the dress is very important you
don't want to cut corners literally or
figuratively when you're doing that part
of this process because it's really
frustrating to almost be done with your
image after hours of editing and realize
I didn't do a very good job of you know
blending the dress pieces and to begin
with so take your time select each piece
thoughtfully I had to change a lot of
things sometimes I added one part of a
dress and decided it didn't work well or
it didn't flow right with the fabric
don't be afraid to just scrap it and
start a section over again I know that I
was kind of working backwards which
which is something you probably haven't
seen before but this edit took about
four hours and so do we do that would
have been kind of boring for you so
instead I just went through and and gave
you know the best piece of pieces of
advice that I thought would work best
for you so I hope you enjoyed this
tutorial and I hope that that editing
advice works for you I know it requires
a little bit of working knowledge of
Photoshop thanks so much
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that's it
you