Lessons

Lesson Info

Photographing Smoke

by far one of most interesting things that I've done a few times. I think this is really fun is to make brushes out of smoke because that could be used in lots of different ways. So we started thinking about that, and they said we could set this up to actually show you a live shoot of smoke. But actually did that here probably was at a two year and 1/2 ago. Maybe so instead of redoing that whole thing, we thought, It just be much easier to say. Let's watch a segment of Dave making smoke So we're going to show you that segment from a previous class. Now we will see how it was set up, and then once that's finished, I'll show you again. How I would then use that in some other ways. If you look first to a search for, like, free Photoshopped brushes, you find a ton of them waste a whole day doing that, and I saw some that were anything, but I thought I'd like to experiment with making my own brushes out of anything, including smoke. I thought that would be an interesting option, so I tried ...

it once It was like, OK, this is cool. So that's why I decided to do this demonstration to show both the set up for lighting and things. But then you'll see me take some photographs of smoke and then we'll see in the next segment later on how to actually convert them into brushes and how we can use them in some interesting ways. So basically this set up we've got here, we've got a smoke machine and using a couple of light. So in the background, I have, ah, black just a regular seamless role. And I've got to light set up here and I'm actually using I'm very happy to say brand new lights never before seen actually have been, but I'd like trade shows. But my good friends at Westcott sent me these brand new lights. Which of their sky Lux led and basically the idea behind them as they look kind of like a strobe, but their constant light so they pump out like all the time. I've got a couple of strip boxes on here with modifiers grids on here because I really want to focus the light. And as you can see, I have the lights kind of coming angle from behind because the black is far enough away. It will stay fairly black. And if it's not completely black, I will make it black later on because we're gonna capture our files and then eventually bring him into Photoshopped. And there's a couple of key kind of points we need to think about here in Photoshopped, the way a brush works. Whatever is black is your brush. Whatever's white is transparent. So I'm going to be shooting everything negatively here because, of course, our smoke is white in the background is black. So as hard as this may be to picture in your mind, I'm looking at it, imagining what will look like when I flip it. The other way around is eventually info shop. I need black smoke, white background, but we felt it was much too expensive to generate black smoke. So using white smoke and ending up black is a better way to go. And again, I'm not terribly concerned. Normally when I do this in my studio, I turn out all the lights. Once I've got it set up and you go just by the light of here. There's a bit more light in here, but it's still it will still work. You'll still get the idea of what we're doing here. And, um, I'm of the belief that that many of us out there are solo artists we don't have on assistant that says, Hey, you come and move this for me. So for the most part, that was actually my plan was to be completely solo until I discovered that in order to tether so you guys could see it eliminated. The ability to use Interval shooting on my camera is usually What I do by myself is I use my shooting manual, my camera to say, Take one photo every five seconds and take 100 or whatever the number is. So then I can stand closer to the smoke and do things. So once I've got set up, we're gonna have the automated assistant pressing the shutter every so often to do the equivalent of interval shooting. But realistically, this set up. What I like about it is once you kind of do it once, you really can do it yourself. We've got the lights angle, no, all change it up a little bit to show you some difference. But right now, like I said, the the led lights thes air 1200 watt lights there daylight balance so you can still get really nice color out of them. And the only thing that you may find is that if you're used to shooting with strobes or speed lights that pop out, a lot of power is you might put your eyes a little higher because this light is just a litte not quite as intense as a stroke. If you're doing still life where nothing's moving at all, it doesn't really matter. But in this case, since the smoke is gonna be moving a bit, I still want the shutter speed to be fast enough to kind of freezing. Having said that, one of the fun parts about experiment, this kind of thing is that you can say, Well, what happens if I put my shutter speed really slow and make the smoke look quite different? So all bets are off here. You can try anything you want. We're not trying to get a perfect portrait of a person where we need to do certain settings. This is all about capturing something so that when we eventually bringing the Photoshopped to make it into a brush. So it looks like our smoke machine is ready. So I'm gonna do just a couple of test shots here. Toe, make sure the hard part is focusing, because right now, there's nothing to focus on. So let me just do a little bit of smoke there. So right away I'm looking at that and going, that's already cool, because if you imagine that the other way around black on white and that becomes a brush you can use to do backgrounds and borders and all that kind of thing. Now, this is a great smoke machine. The one I have, which was bought at the Halloween store for considerably less mind kind of goes and the smoke goes so far away this one goes, and just like, puts this smoke out like this. That's just like, did I turn off suddenly? Okay, when I was using it before, I could do two or three shots at a time. So any time you can find one where the density of the smoke is thicker, that's gonna help. But even if you don't one of things that I found what we're gonna demonstrate a moment to once we get this going again is so you can play with the smoke, too. It's gonna first just kind of shoot out and fade around. But then you have the option off, especially if you do that interval timer thing where the cameras just shooting automatically is. Then you can periodically do a little bit of smoke and then kind of play with it. There we go. All I do is just every so often. There's some nice little general breeze here, just from like air conditions. So it's starting to spin and do interesting things as it is. But then the other thing that I would often do is just get into it and just kind of play with a little bit and make it less. Now, when you do that, of course, gonna take away some of the smoke. But that's kind of the experimental part. The only downside of these things is after a while, they just get smoke everywhere every so often, yet just kind of clean out a little bit and say Stop all that. And most smoke machines are always smoking a little bit, so there's always gonna be some I know. What? The word for that B and B and smoke. I don't know what that would be, but something like that. Okay, so we're already kind of along the lines of what I had in mind, and I'm just doing a little burst. That's nice. One not focus, though. So I'm gonna put my focus off of automatic once because I now know what kind of got things in the right place. Then, by taking off autofocus, I won't lose one where the focus kind of gets out of whack. So I've got my camera set, Teoh. I want to say it's 500 s, so I think 6 40 just because of the amount of light that's coming in. So the other thing I would experiment with to try different things. These lights come with a couple of different options thes air strip banks. You can also get covers that have different degree of grid. So to really focus the light so even that will change things up a little bit. But even just with these ones changing the angle or taking the grid off, pump out more light. So right away that's gonna make a difference. And I don't mind if I'm getting other things in here. So if I'm see, even if I see the light a little bit on the outside edge, that's okay, because I'm gonna be zooming a little bit and finding different areas that I like. Um, generally, though, I'm trying to back like this as much as I can so that the smoke is lit from behind. Now I'm using two lights here. You could use one. You could use seven up to you. You have lots of light than use them, but I would make it as backlit as possible. I tried one experiment once were just for fun. I took a light and put it almost directly underneath it. And that changed the impact quite dramatically. Unfortunately, Put a little bit more light on the background because of the angle. It was just The main thing is we want to try to keep the background black. It is possible, of course, in Kamerad to go in and say, Well, let's make the background blacker and the smoke whiter, but like a lot of things. If I'm taking 85 photos of smoke, I don't want to do that all the time, so I try to get as close as I can from the camera. So that's where I would experiment with the angle of these lights and putting the grid on or off to try and get it as backlit as possible. Oh, that sounds good. I don't know what happened there, but that's look at that. Someone who's an expert in smoke would say, That's the Boeri royalists effect that causes those things. Don't know what that is. That's awesome. I've never seen that before. That's pretty cool. Get some of those a day. Which Lynch do you have there? This is a, uh, 24 to 70 that I borrowed from Lens Protego cause mine was not working suddenly very nicely. Sent it to me so I could try it out. We talked a little about lends to go kind of thing, lens pro to go out and borrow stops over. In this case, that helped me out a lot. But the cool thing about this shooting for brushes, ideas, anything will work. Whatever lens you have, you just play around with the settings cause I usually have to worry with lenses about well that would distort someone's face. Or that would be too wide angle here. Whatever you know, if you have a wide angle lens, put it closer. You have a longer lens. Put it further back. I'm shooting at 70 because I like the look of it. But I could also put it back a little lower and move it closer and get a very different look. The other thing that I'm not doing today just because of the tether cable and the way my brackets set up is I would also turn my camera vertically and do some vertical shots. Just change it up a bit. In this case, this because of smoke is coming out sideways. It kind of makes sense to keep my camera oriented that way. But just to change things up, I might choose suited vertically at the same time, I'm looking at the monitor every so often I'm imagining it. What would that look like if it was vertical? So I always have that option is just switch it. The vertical afterwards either way just rotated around. So, John, would you like to come in? This is my greatest. Isn't John here? And while we're at it. Can we ask about your apertura in your shutter speed and how you talk a little bit about that? I'm just I'm using settings where I'm just trying to get a decent look. I'm I probably think I'm a 2.8 on this lens because I'm trying to keep the shutter speed not too slow. And I don't want to put the I s o too high and make it noisy. Even though there's some movement I might occasionally try shooting at a faster shutter speed to make sure I'm really freezing the smoke. But I found his experiment. I kind of liked the look of a little bit of motion. So that's a very personal preference. I would say. If you try and go, it's a little too blurry for me than change your settings. Put the I asshole higher shouldn't go a faster shutter speed. Something like that. So if this was so, imagine for a moment the camera is automatically taking photos. I can't do that because of chattering. So, John just gonna be the automatic shutter pressure guy. So it's all set on manual focus or won't refocus, But this is if I was by myself. I would set the camera on interval shooting to say, Take one photo every X seconds, whatever that might be. Three seconds, five seconds. And then periodically I do a little shot of smoke, and then I'm quite literally playing with the smoke with my hands or with a piece of cardboard, something to try and change it up a bit so they don't all look the same. I don't have any secret formula. This is all just playing around and seeing what happens. I think I will, though, where we do this, just take this other grid off. Pumped up a bit more light. These lights have a dial on the back that determine how much light. So this previous, their West Coast previous constant lights were the spider lights that had multiple, like three or four switches. These this has a dial now, so you can dial it up or down to kind of get the result you want. Okay, let's go. So I'm gonna just kind of play with this, and I also fully expect every so often to get photographs of my hands in the frame because I can't get them out fast enough. So you just keep shooting every so often. Go ahead. This is the fun part. You just have no idea what's gonna happen here. So we just kind of do things every so often, it kind of runs out of steam. Get it? That was bad. I feel like we should have the smell of incense and Indian music or something going on the down. The one thing you have to be careful of, I realized for somebody, this is happening. But now, if you get a little over, uh, do a little bit too much with wind, then it stays around for a bit. So the next time you go to put some smoke out, it's going to still be flying around a bit. So I just kind of clean this up a little bit for a second, as I really wanna have areas where there's some really dense smoke coming out way. Now, if the first time you do this, the likelihood is, and even here I'm just I was looking at the tether to see where we're at. And that would be half the battle be. Look at someone go. OK, I should have changed that I should have done that differently. But the need part about this whole thing is the net result. It's still a brush and by nature, a brush. If you have one that's semi see through than the brush will be semi see through so even isn't as sharp as you might want. Or there's parts where there's a little bit of smoke at the top. That's still going to be interesting effect. So I don't ever consider anything a complete throw away unless it's like, Oops, my hand is right in the middle of it And even that might be cool, Who knows? So that was our demonstration that was class called Photoshopped creativity That was done a couple of years ago. So I had a thought, fleeting thought before I left on this trip that I was gonna figure out what outfit I wore and when we came back from the clip, have that on a Ziff we just completed. But that's way too much effort toe change clothes in the middle. But that couple of notes I want to make it without watching it now. First of all, it's really weird to sit here and watch myself like that, but because I was shooting tether when I shoot tethered myself in my studio, I don't use light room. Say that aloud. I used another piece of software that is free on my Macintosh. But if you were shooting tether and light room, one of things that occurred to me afterwards, I kept saying, You have to imagine this like it's the inverse but in light room, I could have applied on effect to make the inverse, and from then on, every shot that came in would have been appearing in that black on white and said, a white on black, which would have helped picture what was happening. But the key points to take away from that is even images where Yoon you're doing the smoking like that that's not working at all. It still could be used for something, Man. I wouldn't be a brush. It may turn into some kind of overlay texture, and Narbonne has access to a smoke machine. The one I have, quite literally not exaggerating, Say it cost me like $79 that you know, the the annual stores that pop up for Halloween that I bought would be five years ago because I kind of into Halloween little bit. So it's around anyway. And before this trip blast on Tuesday, I went back into my studio and took a few more smoke shots just to have some to show today to show what they actually do with them. Um, I captured them all in raw. That could easily have been J. Peg if I was shooting more quickly. But part of the reason is again the raw file has more of an opportunity for me to continue toe play with things. So let me show you a couple of the some of the ones that I did Uh, this was just the other day with my poor imitation of that wonderful smoke machine that was putting out such dense smoke, but you can see even here. So this is them right out of the camera just now. This one. Obviously, I must have done something to some of them. Have a little bit like this one on my screen. Looks little bluish. So eventually, when I bring into fuller shop, I'm gonna try to switch it up a little bit. So let's go back to this one, and I'm going to put it back the way it was, uh, on camera. OK, so just to show you an idea of how I would work with this, it doesn't bother me that you can see part of the apple box that I was using for my smoke machine, cause eventually I'm going to be more specific about the area. That's why I mentioned in that video. I don't care if I can see part of a light as long as there's enough separation. So in here, all I'm trying to do is say, Let make this smoke a little whiter and the other area is a little darker now. This is when we talked before about camera smart objects. This is our first example of where I can use this and take advantage. If I wasn't using that smart object concept, I would have to take a guess and say, I think that's a pretty good development setting for this smoke, but I don't really know until I define is a brush. So because I've got this set up with that camera smart object concept, it means once I think it looks pretty good, I can choose open object, and then use an adjustment layer called Invert. So now I've got black on white. So once I've done that, now I can start looking at and saying, Would that make a decent brush or not? And the answer is probably, but you don't really know until you try it. What I'm looking for is this middle part here looks pretty dark, so that's good. And there's other parts that air. And of course, because it's smoked by nature, it is going to be semi see through. So this is one of those ones where he said, before, make sure you're using black 100% black. That's for things like type and logos. But when you're creating something, this is going to be a design element that by nature is see through like smoke. Then this is the approach I would take. Just make sure that I'm getting some areas of black. I don't want all these other elements. I'm not sure what this little piece here, it looks like some weird part of smoke that just didn't work for some reason, so I would just make a rough selection like this. One of the little tricks that I find helps when you stared something too long like this where I'm looking at the black smoke on the white background because I turn with that invert adjustment layer on. I want to make sure I didn't miss anything important, so I might temporarily turn it back off again just to make sure I didn't cut off something really vital. But ultimately, this is what I want to make my brush out of. So we can go to our defined brush preset, okay. And then with everything else as is I'm still selected. Still got inverse because this is a live effect, I could say, Well, let's do some further experiment to see what happens if I push this even further this way and pump the clarity up and see what that does. So you see, that just changed things. So now I'm actually missing part of this brush up here that I don't want to cut off, so I'd have to add that into my selection. I think I want to take away this little part here because whatever that is, I don't want to see obvious edges for anything. And sometimes the solution is to actually feather. This selection will bit to make sure you're not missing anything. So now we could make another brush is gonna be obviously very much like the 1st 1 but a little bit different because of the intensity of the blacks and the whites. So that's kind of the The process that I would go through once I have all these raw shots of smoke is to take advantage of the camera smart object. Do the invert adjustment layer. And I could also inverted in camera raw, of course, but I just find this easier to do. So it's one more step, and then I can keep going back and forth and making further adjustments and making a brush. Usually what I before I go too far? This is what I would also do. I have this set up. I define one or two brushes and then to see if it actually looks half decent or not. Uh, let's just go back here. I would open some photograph only use this one again just because it has enough contrast that I could see that make it a little smaller to save time. You know, I already have a blank layer there, so I press be for brush, and there's my the way the brush piled work is the last couple of brushes you define will be the last couple of ones, so I can make this one bigger. It's on a separate layer of white is my foreman color, and I click. And now I've got a perfect shot of smokable array here face completely, which is fantastic. Now you say it would not do that, but it started. Show you that's what that effect just did. Let's undo that. Make a little bit smaller. So normally, what I would do is what they have in cases where she's already a separate layers. Aiken uses the background or even here, this is a layer. So of course I can use our method of Lauren the opacity, so it's a little less obvious, and we'll look at some other ways to actually use these later on. But during the process of trying to find a smoke brush, I would usually very quickly do a quick test to see what it looks like in the context of an actual photograph and then, if necessary, go back to this smoke making document and make some tweaks to its okay. Maybe that's a little too blacks I want to go back to camera on Make it so it's not quite so obvious, you know, whatever it might be, look okay, so updates and then redefine a brush. So during my experimental phase, I might end up with five or six different versions of the same brush and then go in back later and delete the ones that didn't work quite as well. And we'll show you how to do that a little bit later on as well. So that's kind of the aspect of making smoke are making brushes out of smoke. And I keep saying brushes. But of course, once it's in here, then it could also just be treated more like an over latex critic, the whole document, and bring it in the way it is, and we'll look at that as well. Now, after I did this whole thing with smoke, I was browsing around sometime later and saw a technique someone created. I thought, That's brilliant and I wish I thought of that so I can't take credit. I wish I could remember the name of this person that did this, but they were talking about making smoke and fog brushes. But instead of doing this whole big thing with a smoke machine, they took, went to their local craft store and bought a glass rectangular vase like you can get for doing arrangements and they filled it with water, put a black car behind it and drop milk into it. And I was like, That's really smart because then it was effectively the same idea White on black. They couldn't around, but all done in a much more contained little space. They just a couple lights on it. And I thought, That's the next thing on my list to try because that's a pretty interesting idea that could be done. Similar idea, but on a smaller scale. So if you think about that kind of thing, you know what? What? What can you use to create elements like this? Yes, again, you could just go searching for smoke brushes and find ones that someone else made, therefore you, But to me, this is part of the fun aspect and knowing that your create something that's unique for yourself now, of course, in this case, it's not gonna be complete, unique as I'm going to give you some of these smoke brushes, so then you could make ones that are exactly the same as mine. But I would encourage you to still be prepared to try this kind of thing because it really does have some interesting possibilities. I did forget one thing I want to show you. Do we have any questions about the whole smoky brush thing before we you touched on this? But we had a couple of people who were still curious. Could you explain one more time why the smoke had to be black rather than just have it be white? Well, if you think about the principle of how a brush is created, it's whatever is black is the brush. Whatever is white is see through. So if I left it as, um like this and just made it a brush out of that, what would happen is the white smoke part would be the non brush and everything else the black part would be this big black blob of a brush. Okay, so, I mean, I could do that, but it would be very unusual, cause I get a big rectangular brush with a weird hole in the middle, so any time and the way I think about it is if you think the basic thing we did first of make a copyright brush, it was black text on a white background. So because of that, that's usually the overriding concept is black is the brush white is see through. So that's why it makes better sense in this case to photograph of this way but then inverted. So it's black on white just for a brush making purpose. Now, having said that, if I decided to just take this entire document and drag it over so it's not a brush but just made something like this and then chose a blend mode to get rid of all the black, then I would need to do that because I'm not using it as a brush amusing. I just as a an actual document, so that's always another possibility. But in the brush making mode, it's best to think of. Black is the brush or shades of dark way and black of the brush. White is transparent. Okay, okay, So back when we were scanning before there was one of the thought process I wanted to plant the seed in your head, and I just forgot to show it because it was under a pile of my various bits and pieces here. But the other thing that I bought at that same store was a little package of basically just solid colored paper, different shades. And the reason I did that is because I I wanted to remember we start again. Number of years ago. Someone asked because I often take requests for tutorials for various websites. Some said, Can you show me how toe make what looks like a tourney paper edge in photo shop? And I did. But it took a long time. I thought, You know, I might just tear a piece of paper and take a photograph of the next time that would emulate torn paper so much more easily. So that's what this is. I just took this paper and I literally just took an edge of it and discarded, ripping it across in the way paper terrors that always gets that little bit of you, see the solid paper and then a bit of kind of rougher edge. And then I just put it against a different color. So there's enough contrast neither photographed or scanned it in. So that way, when I go to use it in photo shop, I've got a nice contrast of edges to make a selection. So this is another thought in any time you start saying, How could I emulate wrinkle paper or folded paper like, Well, you could, you know, full paper, because I know we sometimes you want to generate everything out of Photoshopped, but I've seen tutorials that took, like, 27 steps to make a torrent paper edge on like or just There's a paper, you know, sometimes I think we get to, and that's one reason I want also show this idea of arts and crafts. And sometimes we get so caught up on how can I digitally create this? Whereas it might be just a whole lot easier to use physical things that exists and say, Let's just fold the paper And so we take a photograph of, you know, folds in the paper. So that's another idea. Again. This collection of paper probably cost me on a $5 for the huge way more than I'll ever use different colors. But out gives me some different options, and then I again scanned that in one of these ones here. There it is. So now you can see when you look at the edge, you've got this beautiful tourney paper agile, all the little tiny threads of paper that would I ever be able to do that from scratch and Photoshopped, you know, maybe, but honestly, why it takes so much longer than just to to make use of that. And then we'll see later on how we can use that in our design to do something with it.