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Light Painting Composite

now there's a lot of other things that I do with this. Ah, these techniques. Let's take a look at one which would be light painting at night time, usually about 30 minutes after the sun goes down. It's dark enough to do light painting. And if you have a blue sky instead of overcast, I would start taking a photograph, maybe 30 minutes after sunset, and try to just get the sky. That's what I did heroes in Grand Teton. And then I'm gonna leave my camera on a tripod so doesn't move. From what I took this shot, and I'm going to start doing slower are shorter shutter speeds. This one here might have been a minute and 1/2 or something to get that sky to show up. But then I'm gonna start doing maybe 30 seconds to two minute exposures and I'm gonna grab a flashlight and I'm gonna walk into the scene that's here and start lighting objects with my flashlight. I can paint and imagine. It's like a fire hose, and you just need to dampen down a building. Well, you start in the left side, get it wet, ...

and then work your way across except for you during it with light. So here's one of my shots. There's a barn there and I started painting the left side I'm standing. Maybe I don't know about doesn't feed away from this building in I'm painting the light I'm just off to the side and I paint the light across the building during a long exposure. Then I closed my shutter I open it again and I go light another portion in this case the rooftop and I close the shutter. Open it again and shoot another spot and do that again here. I'm right at the camera, I believe, and I'm putting the flashlight near the ground and relating it across the ground. Get the front again edge, maybe get a tree. I walked way over there to get that. I have a little remote that I can hold in my hand so I don't actually have to walk to the camera each time. Well, I'm gonna select all those images with command. A. I'm gonna go to the tools menu in load files into Photoshopped layers. It says it's busy, but I know it's not. Take it just a moment to create a document that contains all those images. I no longer need the timeline. So I'm gonna go to the side menu of the timeline panel and choose clothes, and now I'm gonna combine these layers together. Now, in a separate lesson for the complete guide, we talked about blending modes. I'm gonna use one here. I'm going to select all of these layers and I'm gonna go to the top of my layers panel there. There's a pop up menu and I'm going to change it to a choice called lighten. When I do, all of those layers will combine together, and it's going to make it so the top layer can Onley Brighton what's under it. And if you look at the top layer, most of its solid black and solid black isn't capable of brightening, so that part won't show up. And then the one below it. This is only going to be able to lighten what's underneath it. So these solid black areas wouldn't show up on Lee where there's enough light to be brighter than what's down here. Will it show up? So we get this. There is an alternative mode. If I select all these and it's called Screen Screen is gonna add together the light that was in each one of those layers. It will always produce a brighter result and sometimes could be nice if their end result was looking a little dark. But I'm going to use light mode. But now that doesn't mean you're stuck with this end result. Since we have these on separate layers, I can turn a layer off and back on again, decide if I like it what it contributes to the image. And then I can go to the next layer down and do the same thing in as I find different layers. This one here I wish was warmer. I wish that locum or yellowish, like the front of the barn, well, I can go down here. If I do an adjustment layer, I'd have to clip it to that layers. It only affected it, but if I come here to image adjustments, this would apply to the layer directly. Then, when we talked about adjusting color, I mentioned that each one of these colors has an opposite in the opposite of blue is yellow. So if I bring down blue should get more yellow. There is. But once I do, it looks too green. So I can choose green from here in less than that as well. The opposite of green is magenta. There we go. Good. Okay. And then I can go to the next layer and decide. Do I like it to me? That's too bright. So I click on that layer and I lower the opacity to control How strong is it? And I could do a similar adjustment to make that more yellow if it wanted to go to the next layer down to it off and on to decide. That's too strong. I'm gonna lower its opacity to lessen it. And I wish it wasn't so bright near the edge of the frame out there you could add a layer mask, grab my brush, and with a huge, soft edged brush, I don't want to completely remove it. So I'm gonna lower my a pass ity. I might bring line passing two down to about 20 and I'm just gonna paint down here to try to lessen that. But that's a layer mask with my capacity turned down, and I just continue working the image each one in turn on and off and say, Do I like what that's doing now? It's too much in most of the areas, but I do like what it's doing to the window that's in there. Well, so just at a mask. And if you don't like what it does in most areas, you can invert the mask, which turns it black. It makes it so it's not showing up anywhere. Then I come in here and paint with white to control where it shows up and say, I like that right here where the window is and do the same for the next layer. I don't like their get some spill onto the building itself. So Adam ask. We'll paint with black, get this extra spill off the building here. Maybe I don't like there's a little fence over there. It looks like a car might have driven by. So I add a layer mask, paint with black and say, I don't want that fence. I'd be a little more careful than I'm being, but you get the idea. I see a red line in there. That means a car went by. That's its tail lights, and I'm gonna turn off these layers one at a time to see When does it go away? There it is. So that's the layer. I add a layer mask, too. Paint with black. Get rid of it. So you get the idea that light painting by taking multiple exposures in combining them in photo shop is much more versatile than trying to do it in a single exposure. Then the only other thing I would do here is I'm gonna create a brand new empty layer and there's one little spot right here. A little red light that was on during all the exposures. I'll use a spot healing brush to get rid of it in this little spot above. So there is my light painting. So in Photoshop, you can do a lot more. If you think about photo shop at the time you're behind your camera, and the more you can start making a connection between shooting and Photoshopped, the more you're gonna start developing techniques like these to get more out of your images. And I do all sorts of techniques like these, and I find the more I do, the more I really enjoy the shooting and compositing process. So I hope you've enjoying ah Photoshopped, The Complete Guide

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