Transcripts
1. Abstract Art With Milk and Food Coloring: Hey guys, Today we're
going to learn how to have some artistic fun with
milk and food coloring. Who knew? We're gonna go
over the full process. We're going to learn
about the tools that you need in order to
make this happen. And I'm going to teach you about the camera settings
and some things that you can do in camera for your best chance of success. We're gonna go through some
basic editing in Lightroom. And then we're gonna go through some extra kind of
unusual creative editing, editing in an external program for some more unique results. So we are going to show you
how to turn something like this into something like this
with the click of a button. So that should be fun. Let's do this thing. I will see you in class.
2. What You'll Need: Okay, So you are going to need some sort of dish of
pirates are corral dish, some Q-tips, and go ahead and get a set of assorted
color or food coloring, food grade food coloring. You'll want a little dish
full of just some dish soap. Regular dish soap is fine. None of the foam or
anything like that, just regular dish soap and
just milk, whole milk, or at least 2% will probably be better because it needs
to be a thick white milk. Let's get started.
3. The Process: First things first,
you're going to need your camera obviously, but you're going to want it
suspended over that dish so that the front element is
parallel with the liquid. A macro lens or a zoom
lens with a diopter on it, which is a close-up
filter, is probably best. You can use your phone as
long as you have a tripod. Alright, I have had
the best results shooting around F8 or FL1. Manually focus on the milk. I know it's hard to do, but try and find a
bubble and focus on the little point where the
bubble meets the liquid. That way you're focused
on the surface. Try at least one, one-hundredth of a second, especially when you're
swirling a little bit faster, you're going to want
faster shutter speeds. Shoot at whatever ISO is needed based on your
available light. If your light source is a
window on a bright day, which is perfectly good
for this type of work. You're going to probably
be in the ISO 800 range. Me being indoors with some
LED lights that I was using. I was shooting at ISO 1,600. So just pick whatever
ISO is needed, put it in manual mode for this. And if you can shoot in RAW to adjust the white
balance later. So you'll have some
versatility there. Or you can set the white balance manually in camera if you're shooting jpegs and you've got a little bit less latitude
on the computer later. Alright, let's get started. Okay, so you're gonna
wanna make sure that you obviously add your
milk to the dish. We'll do that first. And you only need about
maybe a quarter of an inch, a centimeter or so of liquid
in the bottom of that dish. You do not need it
to be very deep. And then grab your
food coloring. You don't have to use
every color in the box. If you just want
to experiment with one or two colors, that's fine. I typically just go for it
and start out with all four. And I would put maybe
one or two drops of each color that
you want to use. That way you've got plenty
to try this again and again. Red, little blue, a
little bit of yellow. Now I'm getting some
green in there. You can see how you can just mix one or just two
colors and get that. Third, like if you wanted to create some purples and
lavender is you could just start with blue and red and just work with those two
colors by themselves. Now you're going to take
a little bit of soap. You do not eat a lot.
Just a tiny little bit on the end of your Q-tip. And just touch and
watch the colors swirl. They will spread out from the
middle, the very beginning. So kinda push them around. If you use the soapy
end, the pushing around, you're going to end up creating
a lot more separation. If you want to keep the
swirls somewhat together, you might use the other end
that doesn't have soap on it. But be mindful that
the more you do this, the more your
colors are going to mix between themselves
and the milk. And you might end up
with just something that looks kinda muddy
and weird instead of some pretty
flowing swirls and patterns and curls and the things that I
typically like to go for. So when it does get
muddy like that, just wash your dishes
out and start over. Just go ahead and get the
colors that you want to use. Dab that Q tip again, use a fresh one and spread
those colors again. You can do this over
and over again. Lots of fun. Something else you could try that
is still milk bear. What I did was I put the dish
because it's a clear dish. I put it on top of a light, like an LED light, and so that it was
actually backlit. I just wanted to experiment and see if I could get
a different look. I wasn't hugely fond of
it when I finished it, but It's all about
trial and error. Go ahead and try putting these
colors in water instead of milk with something that has some color or
maybe black behind it. Because I've got a
black cloth underneath this dish so I can use
that as well without using the milk and just spread the colors around
the block on top of the or over the black
cloth and see what I get. So don't be afraid to try something different than
what you're seeing here. This is just a
beginning for you. It's always fun to experiment.
4. Post Processing: All right, so just
like any other image, these need to be edited. So when you are all done, you're going to end up with
a whole bunch of photos. You can actually see the swirling pattern
all in a row here. Now, I've gone ahead and done a white balance adjustment
to all of these. That's the beautiful
thing about Lightroom, is that you can adjust
them all at once. However, if you are
just bringing them in here and you don't
quite know how to do that. All you gotta do is bring an image into the
develop module. And then you click on the white balance selector and just put it anywhere that you think
should be neutral, which in this case should
be the milk itself. So if you've got any areas where the milk is showing through, That's where you want
to put the dropper. Because if you put it
on something like this, you're gonna get some
really weird colors. So let's pick that again
and put it on white. There we go. So now all of my images have
got more or less white milk. And then what I wanna do
with all of them is you can grab the one that
you just manipulated. Hold the Shift key, and grab a whole bunch. Let's click on sync
and it will transfer that white balance
adjustment to all of them. So say here, I wanted to
do some basic adjustments. This is one of the
things that I do on almost every photo. So this is like my
30-second photo fixed. So I'm going to
hold the Shift key and double-click highlights. Hold the Shift key again. Double-click shadows. Same thing on the whites, and same thing on the blacks. And what that does is it sets the overall exposure and it sets your black point
and your white point. Now, you can make some adjustments
from here if you like. Now I think that the
whites are probably a little bit too bright there. I'm seeing some weird
things happen with the yellow in that
area right there. And then maybe just a
little bit of clarity. Now, depending on
what your ISO was, you might want to come down to the details lighter and
do some noise reduction. Now, again, you only have
to do this on one photo. Hold the Shift key here. Let's go ahead and put
that way over here. So here's number 135 is the one that I just did
those adjustments and you can see how that is definitely different than
all of these others. So I'm going to
hold the Shift key. We're just gonna
do a few of these. And then I'm going
to click on sync. And I'm just going
to leave everything checked and let it go
ahead and synchronize. And you can see those changes occurring on all of
these other ones. So now if I click on one that I didn't make any changes too, you can see how the
image is darker. All the sliders are
in the middle here. And so if I click on
one that was sync, and you can see how it made
all of these same changes. So that is a quick way to just kinda batch
process all of these. Typing the G key, I'm going back to my grid. And typically what I'm
just looking for here, you can see I've already
played with a few of these and you'll see
how to do all of that. So apparently my dish
was twisted here. So yeah, These can be a mess. They really can. Some of them, you can see
here that I've gotten a little too much mixing going on maybe or
you might like this. I don't know, it just depends on what look you're going for. So these are some images that I created before adding
the color yellow. So I've just got blues reds. And then all of a sudden
I added yellow and that brought in a mixture of
some greens as well. Did some mixing there. And you can see when you're
on continuous shooting mode, how you can get all of these in-between looks so I
like this one right here. I like this little
swirl right here. So basically, when I
am calling my images, what I'm going through
here and looking for what I want to keep and
what I want to omit. I might keep something like this because it looks
a little bit interesting. So I'm gonna give it
a one-star rating. So as I scroll through here, I'm looking for some
unique patterns. Every once in a while you'll
see something that you recognize as maybe an animal or a face or
something like that. And you can see here
where I switched. And now I'm working with a fresh set of
colors after it got, it Just got to be a little
bit too muddy and everything was just kinda forming
together and I wasn't getting the swirls that I
want it anymore. So go clean the dish and come
back and start over again. When I call, I'm looking for things that I find interesting. So this one, I found this little swirl on the
middle kind of interesting. So I cropped it and did those basic adjustments again
to give it some more color. And I took it into a program, into something very
unique like this. So I will show you that later. I'm definitely interested in some longer swirls with some little curly n's
here, things like that. So go through and
mark your favorites. I kinda like that one. I like the central
portion of it right here. I'm not afraid to crop. This is a swirly
color mess with milk. It's not gonna be perfectly
square or rectangular here, so you can just crop however
you feel you would like to. Alright, so let's pick
one and kinda edit it, start to finish. So we'll pick this one. So bring it into develop. Again, the white balance
has already been adjusted, so I'm gonna do my Shift
double-click on all of these in order to make sure that my white and
black points are set. And again, it's bringing
those whites up a little too much for
my taste, alright. And I'm going to give it a
little bit of clarity, dehaze. You can give it a
little bit of dehaze. It just depends on what
your results were. Your results are gonna
be different than mine. I'm going to crop this
by typing the letter R, which is a little shortcut. I am a huge fan of shortcuts. Okay. Some interesting things
that maybe we could do in light room so we can turn it into
a black and white. So that's a very
interesting thing to do. I'm gonna do that. I'm probably going to
make my blacks even more, a little bit more rich. Go back to color for the moment. Alright, so the HSL and colors, I typically just
stick with the HSL. So if I wanted to change
one of these colors, so if I wanted my reds
to be a little bit more orange or a little bit
more on the pink side, I can do that. I don't typically go too
far in any one direction. So little adjustments here and there are all
you really need. You can always just reset it. I'm just double-clicking on the sliders to bring
them back to zero. And of course, luminance. Sometimes you might have one particular color showing
up a little bit too bright. Yellows and reds
tend to do that. So I might turn down my red and my yellow
just a little bit. Brighten the blues
or darken them. Blues and the awkwardness. Whatever floats your boat. Now, color grading, if you
come into the color grading, we'll start making adjustments. You're really going
to completely alter the overall
colors of your image. Which can be a lot of fun. Like maybe if you want a
particular design kinda theme. So you can change
your mid tones, your highlights,
and your shadows independently of each other. So right now I'm working on the brightest portions,
my highlights. I wanted to warm my highlights. I would just drag
it more towards the yellow and orange area
of this panel right here. And then my mid tones. So if I wanted my
overall image to appear more on the
pink or magenta side, this is exactly where I could
do something like that. Again, double-click to bring
them all back to zero. What you wanna do with the
colors is entirely up to you. Lightroom does come with
all kinds of presets. If you wanted to come up here and play with these, luckily, if you just hover over them, you can kinda see a preview
of how things will look. Let me go back in
my history here. Got some vintage styles
here, might be fun. Very, very different looks, lots and lots of possibilities. But for the most part, going in to the basic panel and just making simple
adjustments to highlights, shadows, whites and blacks. A little bit of
clarity or dehaze. You can up the vibrance
if you want to, but definitely do that
white balance adjustment on nearly every photo. Just because if you
are shooting indoors, sometimes the camera
just does not make the proper adjustments
even if it's on auto. For your indoor setting. Okay, Just for fun, let's bring an image
into color effects Pro. Now, if you don't
have Nick software, I don't know of
another place where you can find this
particular filter. But it's definitely
worth looking online for maybe some Lightroom presets
that can have it as well. But this is something
that is really unique to color effects pro enough,
the solarization filter. So I'm going to click on
the nondestructive edits and make sure that I have
the ability to come back into this program
at a later date and make changes to
this particular image. So tonal contrast is a nice one. You can see how that just let me go ahead and do the
before and after. So that just give
it a little boost of contrast all over the image. And I tend to use that
one quite frequently. And now I'm going
to add this one. It's a little strange, but it can be so much fun
with this type of work. So that's solarization. Once I hit the solarization, I'm going to come
over to the method. And I'm just going to hover
over the different options here and you can see how
it changes your photo. There's a whole bunch of black
and white ones that will turn good portion of
your image silver, very, very unique
and interesting. And if I put that on the internet and asked
people to guess what it was, I can only imagine the wild
responses that I would get. But I tend to kinda come in here and pick one of
the solarization. Then I don't typically play
with the saturation and usually does quite
enough saturation. I don't need to do anymore. In fact, I may tone it down
a little bit at times. But were you really want to have some fun with the elapsed time. So very subtle
adjustments to this will make a big
difference to your image. As soon as you start
dragging this, you'll see the image
changing quite dramatically overall from N to N. So that's
that particular filter. Or I could switch it to number
two and do the same thing. I'm going to drag the
elapsed time back and forth. And you can see how
it just changes all of the colors in this image. So definitely unique
and different. And I think it's kinda fun if
you have the opportunity to come into a program like
this and really play, you can come up with some really unique
and interesting looking images, your results. What did I just see here? Pastel, I could try that. So I'm going to
click down on that. Now when I clicked on that, it got rid of the solarization. So if you want to
add something else, you've got to click
the little plus icon. So I brought it into pastel. I could change it to something like this
with more blue hues and then maybe go back to the solarization filter and make sure I add the plus icon. And it might just give it
a slightly different look after giving it the
pastel treatment. So yeah, definitely When I
changed the sliders too, I'm getting wider
variety of colors here. I'm just going to click apply. And it will bring it
straight back to Lightroom. There it is. So here is the original and the solarized aversion
is fun, fun, fun. Just for kicks.
Let's try one more. Shift. Double-click, click,
double-click, double-click. Wow, that's a quick improvement. Very, very quick. Those colors just really
popped when I did that. Crop it a little bit. Obviously, you don't have to. I just feel like it and I'm
going to do the same thing. I'm going to bring it into color effects Pro and
do that solarization. I'll just do it really
quickly and see what I get. Fun thing about software. You can just play,
play and create. That looks grainy. Black and white ones look like, wow, those are wild. Would be a really good
T-shirt or something. Almost hurts my eyes. There is the something, something similar so
like before there with the muddied colors and then the simple adjustments
in Lightroom, which made a huge difference. And then doing
something fun with it in an external editor. Just for a little
added creativity. And there's all sorts of
programs that you can use to do this type of thing where you're just adding
different looks to it. On one photo rod has
some unique abilities in it as does lumen are
ai and women are neo. All kinds of fun. So definitely enjoy
the whole process from the image capture and
just being able to play, bring the kids and
they can do it too. This is super easy and not
time-consuming at all, and you probably have most of what you need around
the house already. So have fun with
the whole process, including the photo editing. Don't be afraid to try
some interesting things. And I will see you guys later.
5. Your Project: Okay guys, for your project, I'm pretty sure I don't
even need to say this, but just do this thing. Alright, get everything set up. Make sure that you
have a drop cloth or something around so you don't
make too much of a mess. Maybe even cover up
your clothes because you don't want that
food coloring on you. It can stain, so just be careful about
that type of thing, but go ahead and set up
your photo equipment. You can use your phone. You don't necessarily
have to use a DSLR or mirrorless camera
with all of those settings. You can try it with your
phone if you don't want to do like a really fancy setup, that is totally okay. Just go ahead and give
me some JPEG images. Your results. Feel free to edit them
before posting them. They always look a little
bit better if you go ahead and do those very basic
adjustments that I mentioned in the photo processing segment
about those double-clicking, doing the Shift double-click on highlights and shadows
and blacks and whites. And it really makes
a huge difference that makes the image pop. So I think that that's a useful tool for any
of your photography, really not just this. If you have the
software, go for it, solarized that thing and have fun or use some different
colored filters, use the color grading
in Lightroom is also, it's also in Adobe Camera Raw. Or you can do any
other program that you happen to have where you've got some presets are
some color adjustments, maybe go black and
white, just to have fun. This is, this is a
super easy thing. It's not really complicated, but it can be just fun
and entertaining on a, on a rainy day or a cold day. So enjoy yourself. I look forward to
seeing your results. Okay.
6. Final Thoughts: Well guys, I sure hope you
enjoyed that little bit of creative indoor photo fun with just really
simple stuff, right? Soap, milk, food coloring,
inappropriate dish. That's really all you
need. 0 and some light. Of course we need
light for photography. But anyway, just enjoy
that process and I look forward to seeing
all of your results and hopefully I'll see
you again sometime soon. Take care.
Kate Silvia, Photographer and Artist
