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Light Painting Processing Interior

Lesson 7 from: Lightroom and Photoshop for Architectural Photography

Randy Van Duinen

Light Painting Processing Interior

Lesson 7 from: Lightroom and Photoshop for Architectural Photography

Randy Van Duinen

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Lesson Info

7. Light Painting Processing Interior

Lesson Info

Light Painting Processing Interior

So we've done an exterior light painting. Let's do one inside. Just let you see here, these were the original images. There's me with a target to test it, and you can see all the different light painting that was done. We're just gonna go ahead, again, and use some JPEGs just so that it won't take as long. And we're gonna select them all, go into Photoshop, Edit in, and Open as Layers in Photoshop. You can kinda see a way I do this. It happens almost all the time, I stack the layers in Photoshop and do this work. It allows me to, really with light painting, do large areas. I can, you know, I light painted auditoriums and things like that before. So you can do a large area. You can do a small area like this and give it a unique look. Better than you can if you were just tryin' to do it with one flash or a couple flashes. So here we are. There's our images and, again, they're in the wrong order. So what I want to do is take this one right here, which is my ambient, and I want to go ahead...

and go to Layers, Arrange, Inverse. And now I'm just gonna turn off all these other layers until I get to where I want. All right, so I'm gonna bring this one down and with this one too, down. All right. So this layer right here, you can see, I light painted the back area right here. Just used the flash, went back, then did it. So now I'm gonna change that blending mode to Lighten. And you can see, I've now got my back area lit. What I will do, though, is come up here and go ahead and take my poly-angle tool. And let me get in here a little tighter. And I'm just gonna go ahead and select this frame, 'cause you can see, you can kinda see me in the picture, and I don't want that. So I'm gonna take this image that I light painted from a different area, click on that, and just make a mask, just like that. So now, I'm not in the shot, and it's not there either. Now I want to go ahead and bring in some work right on this area, right here. So I'm gonna take this area, turn it on, and, you can see, I flash this area over here. It looks pretty good. So what I want to do is just put a mask on it and go ahead and just hold the option or alt key, make it a big mask. And I'm just gonna use my brush tool again at 100% and make sure my foreground color is white, make it really big, and just gonna start painting in this flash, right here. Bring it down a little bit. And if I've gone too much, I can always change my foreground color to black and bring it back out. So that allows me to go ahead and get, you know, my exposure for over here right in this front area. So the next one I want to do is this one here. Bring it down, turn it on. Well this, right here, is for this hallway. So all I'm gonna do is go ahead and change the blending mode to lighten and, again, I'm just going to hold the option or alt key, put a mask on it that's full of black, and make sure my foreground color's white, and just start painting it in a little bit. And I might go down to 30% when I get down here so I can kinda blend it in a little bit. So that it blends in with that floor, and now I've lit up the hallway. Maybe a smaller just to get in this wall. And now you can see, I've gone ahead and just blended in the hallway. I want to now go ahead and grab number six. Bring that down and turn that on. So this one, right here, is to help me out with this area, right here. You can see I got a shadow over here that I wanna fix, and I also want to kinda take care of this area, right here, where its light is actually kinda giving a shadow. So I'm gonna go ahead, change the blending mode to Lighten, go ahead and put a mask on it, again, holding the option or alt key, and go ahead and just paint that shadow out of that area right there. And come over here and maybe go 30% and start seein' if I can get some of that shadow from the light out with this exposure. We may have to use another one to do that in a minute, but we'll see. All right, number seven. So now I'm back here lighting this up, and if you come over here, it's really lighting this area up, right here, but not quite as much as I would like. So I'm going to go ahead and add a curves adjustment layer. So I come up here, holding down the alt or option key, click on this button, right here, say OK, and now I'm gonna bring it up. And all I'm doing is looking on this back area, right here. I like that. Say okay and give myself another mask. Holding the option or alt key. And now I can just kinda come in here. And let's just get myself a smaller brush and start painting back in this area here. You can see how that's brightening this area up, a bit. Gonna, whoops, and if you don't like something, paint with black again, which you can do just like that. Go ahead and paint. I want to paint some of this refrigerator. Make sure I have all this area right here, 'cause this is what's really important is that. And there we go. We've added some light into this area here. I wanna go ahead and grab my next layer, bring it down, and this, right here, is to work on this area right here. So, again, I'm gonna change the blending mode to Lighten. And I'm going to put another mask on it, holding down the option or alt key, and with a brush, I think I can use a pretty big brush here. And let's go ahead and start at 100% and see if that'll help out. So we can paint that in, right there. Starting to kind of blend in all this area. Makin' that a little bit brighter. Again, if you go too far, you can go ahead and change it over to black and take it out where you don't like it. Don't like to do that. So it just kind of takin' a look and seein' where you want. I'm on black, still, so I'm gonna go down to 30%, take some of that out. But that really is kind of takin' care of my shadow problem there. And that's looking pretty good. Let's go ahead and take a look at this one. Again, I think that's more lighting (mumbles) in that area. So we're gonna change it Lighten, put a mask on it, holding the option or alt key, and go ahead and paint in here a little bit more, making sure our foreground color's white. And let's do 100% so we can see what we're doin'. And it's bringin' in a little bit more light in there, I like that. And we'll take that, see what it did, nope didn't do anything there. So we're looking pretty good. Let's take a look. So this is a fill layer. Just kind of, I set it back, way in the back here, you know, just to see if I needed to do any filling. I don't think, only thing I can think of, nah, don't even like that. So we're not even gonna use this. Now, you can see this is starting to look pretty good. I like what's going on here. But we have a color problem up here. You can see those lights have now gone ahead and become, you know, yellow in that area. So all we wanna do is go ahead, take the poly-angle tool, like so, create a new layer, call it color. Do you see a pattern here? You can see how I kinda use certain, lot of the same things to take care of different problems. And we'll just go ahead and Modify, Feather. Two pixels. Get our brush and hold the option key here. And just kinda paint in that area there. And, of course, it's probably too much. So let's go ahead and bring our opacity down, like so. All right. Now, the other thing I don't like is the light here. And I would probably have to come in here and take a look at whatever image looked good and cut it out and put it in. But you kinda see it would take a long time just to see me draw a path around that. But that would be the one area that I wouldn't like as much. But you can see how one light can light up a whole area. And you can go from this right here to a lit up area. You probably wanna come in here with some curves, too. I'm lookin' at this whole area, right here. This looks a little bright to me. So I hit the Q key after selecting it. Go to Filters, Blur, Gaussian Blur, give it a really big one, somethin' around there, get back out of it, make sure I'm on the top of the image, go to Curves, and bring that down a bit so it's not so much, like so. And the other thing I'd probably look at, this chair is really bright. So using the quick select tool, I'd also darken that down usin' a Curves layer. Let me close this. And just bringin' that down a little bit so it matches the other chair. And there you go. We have that. So we're getting there, and you can see how buildin' in different things using different layers, doing lighting, doing ambient lighting. You can get a whole lot of different looks from different images.

Ratings and Reviews

JennMercille
 

You really can do anything a thousand different ways in Photoshop! Randy broke down his processes with easy to understand instruction, and made it easy to see how and why you would choose different methods to create impressive architectural images in various situations. Great class!

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