Transcripts
1. Welcome: Hi everyone, Welcome to
creative indoor photography, volume one, oil and water. Okay, It's Silvia, a professional
nature and landscape photographer with nearly 15
years of teaching experience. I cannot wait to share this super fun technique
with you guys. If you find yourself
in a creative rut in your frustrated with the
results of your recent work, there's really no better
way to ignite the fire of creativity than to try
something new and different. In this class, I'm going to show you the tools that
you're going to need, how to set up for maximum success and the
least amount of frustration. I'll give you some
ideas for lenses, filters, lighting, camera
settings that you need to try. And then we're gonna get into some editing of these photos in Adobe Lightroom as
well as Adobe Photoshop. And I have provided for you and equipment list for camera
gear and settings, a list for all supplies that
are used in this class, and a sample photo for you
guys to experiment with in both Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop if you choose
to follow along. So let's bring some fun
back into photography and I will see you in
class. I can't wait.
2. Tools and Methods: Alright, so let's talk about
the actual method here. How do we do this? Okay, you're going
to need some stuff. You're going to need
some cooking oil. So either canola or vegetable, I wouldn't use olive oil,
it'll probably sink. I've tried it in the past
and it absolutely did sink. You could try sunflower seed
oil or something like that. There's all kinds of
choices out there. Just grab whatever you have
at home and try that first. And if not, then I've had success with both
vegetable and canola oils. So you can try those. You're going to
need either a Pyrex or other type of clear dish, something to stir with. Definitely some paper towels because you're probably
going to make a mess. I highly suggest some
sort of remote release or an inner bolometer
interval ometer is just a remote that
is programmable. They're a little
bit more expensive. But just a simple
trigger release will help because you're
going to want to use this. I'll show you an
example later on in this video where you're
going to want to use this in order to do the continuous shooting and have both of your hands
available at the same time. Wanted to shoot with
one to start with. You're going to want
something to pile up to kinda create a level platform
to put the dish over. So if you've got a bigger dish, you're going to have
more space between the two objects
that you're going to lay the dish on top of. So keep that in mind when
you're choosing your dish, the size of your dish. We don't all have big ones, but it'd be nice. So you're going to want to shoot straight down because this is going to help with keeping
the bubbles in focus. Now I've got a special tripod that allows me to kind of get up above something and
shoot straight down. I've done this with
just a regular tripod. And I've set up this whole contraption
on the floor beneath me. Find something super colorful
to put underneath the dish. And if you've got
paintings, drawings, photographs, things with lines running through them tend to
work really well. Because you'll get all of
these little divisions in-between the the
oil and the water. So place your dish on the level platform and just
pour some water in it. It doesn't really matter
terribly how much water? A half an inch or
an inch we'll do. And then you're going to want
to put some oil in there. Now, the amount of oil is
a lot less than you think. If you put too
much oil in there, you're not going to have a
lot of space between where the water meets the oil
and oil meets the water. And so you're going
to want to just maybe a teaspoon is really plenty. I probably put a little bit too much in what you just
saw right there. Because when you stir this up, you're going to
want to see all of these separate areas here
between water and oil. Now, focusing is
absolutely critical. You have to focus manually
because autofocus, if you're continuing to put your hand in there
to stir things, autofocus may try and
focus on your hand. It may try and focus on the
top of the bubbles instead of that fine line in-between
the oil and the water, it may try and focus
on the object that's underneath your dish that's
in the background there. I would recommend
about six to 12 " between your whatever it is that you're using
as your background. So whatever you're
placing on the floor or the table and the dish. Okay, so a good distance between the dish
and the background, so that that background
becomes nice and blurry. But you want those edges
to be super sharp. Otherwise it just doesn't work. Okay, so you're gonna
take your little stirrer and you're just going to slowly move
the liquid around. So you're going to mix it up. And then you're gonna
take your hand out of the way and take a
few photographs, and then you're
going to mix it up, take your hand out of the way, and take a few photographs. So this is what
you end up seeing when you are looking
through the viewfinder. Now, I would highly suggest
using continuous shooting. You can hear it here in
the background. Listen. Okay, so what I'm
doing here is I'm shooting at about one, one-hundredth of a second. I'm at F8 and I ended up around ISO 1,200 based on the lighting. Now there's some
lighting suggestions in the files that I've
attached to this class. I like to use studio
lights for this. You can get away with. Ambient light from a
very bright window, but your ISOs are going
to be a lot higher. I would not use Flash
is just going to reflect terribly
off of the water. And you also can't really use the continuous
shooting and shoot 11 frames per second
or whatever it is it your cameras willing
to do or able to do. You're not gonna be able to
do that with a flash and have the flash output at an equal amount for
each of those shots. But you can see why
one one-hundredth or faster is really required
here because when you stir, that liquid really
is moving pretty quickly right out of the gate and then it
starts to slow down, slow down, slow down. And then you have to start
again to create more patterns. Were bubbles. But you can see how fast
it moves right there. So when you are taking
your shots right there, when it's moving quickly, you're going to want a
fast shutter speeds so you don't end up
with too much blur. Now as far as lenses
are concerned, if you have a macro lens or a close-up lens,
absolutely use that. If you've got one. If you don't have
a dedicated macro, you can use what's
called a diopter, which is a close-up lens is, some people call
it like a filter because it really
does just screw onto the front of any zoom lens. You just got to make sure that the front element of your lens, you need to know
what size that is. If I've got a 72
millimeter front element, I need a 72 millimeter
diopter for it. And that just is like
a magnifying glass. It just brings everything
closer to you. So those are the best options as far as lenses are concerned. If you don't have
either of those, just use a zoom lens and zoom in as far as it will
allow you to do that. But make sure that
you're not too terribly close to
your subject because every lens has a minimum
focusing distance at which point if
you get too close, you just won't be able
to achieve focus. So definitely give that a try. There's a little bit
of trial and error, so take a few shots, check and make sure that
they're focused properly. If you have to adjust focus
a teeny-tiny little bit, you may find that you're
going to have to do that because during the setup
when you fill it with water, if you add any more water, you're going to have
to focus again. If you add any more oil, you're going to
have to focus again because you're changing
the water levels. You're actually changing the
distance between your camera and the dish, full liquids. So take a few
shots, check focus. And if you've been working for a half an hour or
something like that, just check focus again just in case because
you never know. You definitely
don't want them to get back onto the computer and find out that you got a
really cool shot where, oh, it looks like an elephant
and it's out-of-focus. So you don't want
that disappointment. So plan ahead.
3. Editing First Steps: Now your biggest hurdle
is going to be going through all of the
images that you took. While shooting on continuous. You can see that
there's quite a few. I took 589. So I hope you have a really big memory card for all of this. But just a little advice and narrowing these
down because they'll fill up your computer and you're really not going to
use all of them. I would advise looking for
just nice compositions, things that look well balanced. You may even see some faces and animal shapes and
things like that in here. So go through them
slowly and deliberately, but definitely call them out and find your
favorites and use. You can see I've
gone through here and used a star ratings. So a single star to me as
something that I think just has something about it
that I might want to come back and look again. So you can see that there's bunches and bunches in here that didn't even really
rate that much. There are a few in
here that I may have put two or three stars on. Based on overall composition, they feel well balanced
or something like that. Or I may have seen an animal
shape or a face in there. And I want to make sure
that in this whole mess of almost 600 " that
I took in 20 min. But I can come back and
find my favorites faster. So just going through With
the loop view in light room. And all I do is I keep one finger on the number
one on my keyboard. And then I keep the other finger on my arrow key and I just
arrow through them. And if I find one that I think has something
really unique about it, then I will give it a one star and say,
Alright, that's good. And then when I'm
done with that, Here's how I do
the brutal parts. So I go Filter unrated. Now I'm in the
Library module here, so I do unrated. So I click on the last one, and I scroll all the
way to the first one. I hold the Shift key
and I click on it. And now I have 430 of the
589 images that I took. And I press the delete key
and I say delete from disk. And I know that that's brutal, but you kinda have to do it
when I have to come back up here and go from unrated
back to filters off. And then I can see that I still
have tons to choose from. So I don't feel bad really
getting rid of all of those. I think it is going to
help me personally. I saw some some faces in here. Just put kinda cool. So lots of things to
come back and play with. And now let's get into editing
some of these, alright.
4. Edit in Adobe Lightroom: So my normal editing is to
go through and like I said, do one-star for everything
that's worth a second look. But after I've given it a day or two where I'm not as emotionally connected to these images as I was yesterday
or the day before. I'll go through and I will
two-star or three-star. Something that I just, again like the composition
or sea animals are faces or something
like that in it. And because I have
literally hundreds, I still have hundreds leftover. There's just so many. And I don't need these taken up a tremendous
amount of space, either on my regular hard drive or an external hard drive. So I'm gonna go in and select all the ones that were
previously just one star. And so I'm leaving out the three-star and the
two-star ones right here. And I'm again clicking the delete from disk and
getting rid of all of them. And now I have just
20 or 30 or 40 here to deal with
instead of the original 500 and something came in here, which is a ridiculous
amount of photos. Oh my gosh, my poor computer. Okay, so let's get
into how to edit these and some fun
things that you can do in post-processing
with these images. Okay, so I chose this one to give a little bit of extra attention to
you because I feel like it looks almost like a bird of some
sort here I've got an I and a head and maybe
a rosy and spoon bill because it's got this
around a little beak here. But anyway, some fun
things that you might be able to do with this
in post-processing. So I went through and I did some really quick basic stuff. Change the temperature and tint. I raise the exposure a little
bit and did the highlights, shadows, whites and blacks. That's just basic editing. But what I really wanna do is come in here and make
some subtle changes. Now, one of the things that, because the shutter speed that
I needed was at least one, one-hundredth of a second. And you saw that in the video. And I wanted to F9
so that I can get these bubbles and swirls
and stuff in-focus. I had to boost my ISO to 12 50, which is a little, it's a
little high, It's not bad. But I definitely
want to come down into the details section and I, that a little bit
of noise reduction. So that's something
that you can do within Lightroom,
within Photoshop. If you've got an
external noise editor, I use Nick's defined quite
a bit and Topaz de-noise. The new AI software. You can use any of those
softwares in order to do that. Now, the thing that I really want to make sure
that I deal with is there were like little fuzzy hairs
and stuff in I mean, there's just this is just
what happens when you have oil and water and you are playing with it and messing with it
and that one right there is going to
drive me button. So I will come in here and try and either clone out
or erase these things. So I'm going to select
my eraser tool, my healing tool here. So I've got three choices. I've got the Content
Aware remove, which is relatively new in the latest version of
Lightroom Classic. And I've got the traditional
heal and clone stamping. Now, clone stamping left on the automatic selections
here in Lightroom, it probably won't
do a very good job. So I may end up in
Photoshop with this, but I'm going to go ahead
and see what it will do here as far as some of
these little items. I'm going to press and hold
the space bar so I can move my image around without increasing or decreasing
the size of my brush. When I try and scroll with my, I'm using a trackpad. It wants to make my brush
bigger and smaller. So we'll use the Space bar, move things around and then the brush to
get rid of stuff. In particular, I want to remove bring this up where you guys can see a small items
like this in particular, a little hairs and
things like that. Okay, So you can do
that here in Lightroom. It's going to be time-consuming. I'm not going to lie to you, but if you take the time
to do this little step, I really think it's worth it. I think in the long run, especially if you decide
later on down the road. But you want to
make a print from any of these because they
are very, very cool looking. I think you'll want
to make sure that all of these little imperfections
are dealt with. There's nothing to say that you can't get rid of
an actual bubble. If you find that when
you are using the oil, that one of your
favorite patterns happened late in the process. And you ended up with
tons of tiny bubbles. Because the longer you do this, the more of those little
bubbles you're gonna get. The really, really tiny ones. You can come in here. And this is your photo. You can do want, you can clean up all of these little extra bubbles
and just get rid of them. If there's too many
of them, that's fine. That is completely up to you. Okay, So I only really concentrated on this
half of the image, but let's do a quick before
and after of just the simple adjustments that I've
made and the cloning. So that's before and that's after and it
just looks better. This one in particular
right here, keep your eye on that. That one just pops out, oops, in the before and after. You can definitely see that little hair there and that would have
driven me nuts. Okay, so let's look down
in the HSL channel. So here you have some options. So say you liked the overall pattern of whatever it was that you
had underneath your photo. But maybe you want
this yellow to be a little bit more orange. Or maybe you want the purples to be a little bit more pink or
a little bit more blue. In order to just make the image more however you saw
it in your head. Or maybe the white balance was a little bit off or
you'd like to just fix it here in the HSL panel and
luminance in particular. So if your, if your yellows, we're a little bit
too bright and your purples were
a little bit too dark and you want to
balance that out. You can absolutely do that. Don't do things too, too much because it starts
to look a little bit weird. You get these kind of banded
lines in-between colors. So if you're gonna make
some color adjustments, some luminance adjustments make them pretty, pretty subtle. So we've got lots
of magenta in here. So if I just grab this and
slide it back and forth, you can see all of the magenta. So if I wanted to brighten
that up, 10% is typically. So let's turn that off and on. I've just made a
few subtle changes. I'm not really
liking the banding that's happening
with the yellow. I can tell that I push
that a little bit too far when working
in the luminance. So again, very subtle, subtle changes will help. If you are a little bit more advanced and you
maybe want to come to the color grading area. You can adjust the colors
in your mid tones, shadows, and highlights
independently of each other. So let me just show you
really quick what this does. So here are my shadows. If I drag this around, you can see how
dramatically this changes the color and
tone of my shadows. Double-click on that little
button in the middle to go straight back
to the original. So don't be afraid
to come in here and really play with this and
just go wild with it. And then go, Oh gosh, I don't like that at all. And then just
double-click on that and it goes back to
where you started. No worries. So let's strengthen
this effect here. So if for whatever
reason I wanted to use highlights to be
green, That's cool. You can do that. Much more orange or red. So you see how if I
took the yellow in the HSL slider and I
made it more orange. How I ended up with some
banding and things like that. But if you come in here, were those highlights
are located. So the highlights are
all in the yellows here. And I drag that off to the right to make
them more orange. If that was the
look that I wanted. You can see how the transitions
are, in fact smoother. It's just a better, more controlled way to
make these changes. Now I'm going to double-click on these and bring them back. And when I do that
and I look at it, this actually looks
just a smudge, more green to me. So I might actually go ahead and make that a little
bit more yellow. I'm going to bring
that back to normal because I don't want them
to be too, too bright. Just a little bit more towards
the orange side there. So let's do a before
and after of that. So that's before
and that's after. That might be aesthetically
pleasing to me. But on the other hand, if I leave it as is,
let me put it back. Okay. Then I have a kind of like
an almost not really green, green, but almost a
green and magenta which are opposites
on the color wheel. So having opposites
on the color wheel in the same image is
actually helpful. So let's see what happens
if I turn that even more towards the green side. So now I've got more of a green
magenta combination here. So this is, again, strictly personal taste is what you want to do with your photo. I'm going to leave those at
their defaults right now. And I'm going to bring
this into Photoshop. And I want to show
you something else that might be fun to play with.
5. Edit in Adobe Photoshop: Alright, welcome back.
Now we are in Photoshop. So if I wanted to deal with the little fuzzies in the lines and things
like that in Photoshop, I usually do that in a
separate layer because I don't want to permanently
affect the background. So I'm gonna go
ahead and do that, add a blank layer. Now I'm going to select my spot healing tool by
either coming over to the menu here or
typing the shortcut j. I usually just type the
shortcut J and I'm good to go. So I'm going to
select Content Aware. I flipped between Content
Aware or proximity match in order just in case Content Aware
doesn't do a good job. Sometimes proximity
match does a better job. But I definitely want to have to click this sample all layers. I want that for sure. Okay. I'm just pressing my
right bracket key in order to increase
the size of that brush. And I'm going to click
and drag through there. And that did a pretty good job. And I'm going to come back
when I am all done doing this very tedious but
very useful work here. I'll see you guys in a minute. Okay, I spent a little
bit of time in here, so let me turn that layer
off and on and you can see what a difference it makes to just give this a little TLC. So here's off and on. So watch all of
these specs pop up. There they are, and
then disappear. Awesome, so much better. Now, if I'm happy with the
work that I've done there, I do not mind
flattening that layer. I know a lot of people who were very anti flattened layers, but on occasion I
feel like it's okay. So let me duplicate
my background here real quick because I
want to try something else. Alright, so let's go
to Filter Liquify. So here's where you can
make some kinda cheat changes to whatever
this provided for you. So I've gone ahead and made my brush in this
Properties tab pretty big in order to just kinda make sure that we can see what
we're doing here. So if I press right here
and I start pushing, it's going to take these
pixels and move them around. Let me undo that. So say I wanted to emphasize the fact that this bird kinda looks like it has a beak and I
want to stretch it out. So here we go. We just stretch it out
and then undo that. So I just wanted to say, hey, you've got an option in
here, but be careful. If you pulled things too far, you end up with kind of
exposing the back area here. So if something didn't
form the way you wanted, I can grab this
and bring that up, but my brushes so big it's
bringing the bottom as well. And maybe I just want
to bring the top. I'm going to bring this a
little bit further down for the brush size so
that I'm just kinda concentrating on this
little area right here. But now it's doing some funky weird things
that you see if you just keep pressing and holding, you can have some fun here. Alright, let's undo that. That's kinda ridiculous. You can mess with your, with your pressure settings
and things like that. So I'm just going to open
up the eye a little bit more here for the sake of making it look
more like an eye. And I'm just doing
this very gently. And there we go. So I'm happy with that. Let's undo that preview
and redo that preview. Now it looks more like a
happy i than a scowling. I will just say okay to that. And the reason I did
that on a copy of the background was so that I can just come in
here and undo that. Now that is something
that I will maintain in the
final image as a, as a layer and I'll save
that as a PSD or a tiff. I'm going to bring this
into color effects Pro and just show
you what kinda fun, fun thing that you
can do in here. If you really, really, really want to change the
colors and the overall look, come down to there
it is, solarization. So I'm going to add solarization where it
gets a little nuts. But I'm going to use the
drop-down here and just kind of scroll over these and see what different kinds
of looks you can get. If you wanted to do kind of a silvery glowing
black and white, you can come down in
here and do those. Now. Each one of
these now this is not a color effects Pro
class obviously, but I just wanted
to show you some of the fun things that you can do. So if I clicked on that, each one of these
has an elapsed time. So if you click and drag
this back and forth, you can get some really, really unique look and stuff. So there's that one now granted, it crunched and crunched
this thing up terribly. So I might not want that, but just wanted to show you something fun that you
could do after the fact. So let's turn that off and on. I definitely like the
original better there, but I have had some fun and some really unique
outcomes when I brought it into this program and used
that particular filter. And solarization is not a
filter that I typically think to use because it
is so kinda out there. But when you have creative
abstract art like this, you really have complete lemon. You have complete
license to do what you want with any
of your photos. But here for some reason I
feel a little bit more free to just kinda get nuts and creative and come in here and
do different effects. So I can add a
Monday morning for a kinda gloomy overall
tones and hues. If I wanted to, sepia, just turn the whole
thing violet, if I really wanted to, but we're just going to
skip this candle that, but I just wanted to show
you some ideas of some fun, extra over-the-top
things that you can do with these images to make them even more interesting
than they already are. But I think the technique
as a whole is a lot of fun.
6. Your Project : I think it goes without
saying that for your project, I want to see some
oil and water photo clearly and just
send me one JPEG. Jpegs. It it doesn't
matter how many. They don't have to be processed. You don't have to clean them
up if you don't want to. I know that's kinda painful, so I just wanted to see what
you've come up with and if you could just let me know in
the comments on the photo, what was it that
you put underneath? So what was the
subject underneath your glass dish that you
used for inspiration? So I can't wait
to see your work.
7. Final Thoughts and a Bonus: Well, I hope you had
fun more than anything. I hope it wasn't
too frustrating, but I did want to mention here at the
end just a couple of things to look out for that
you might find frustrating. So here I have a series of images that I
took a long, long time ago. This is the very first time
I ever tried this technique. I was photographing over
a bouquet of flowers. So that's why there's
so much color here. And you'll notice that there's these small ridges and
lines running through here that is actually part of the glass making process for the Pyrex dish that I was using. So you may find that
certain areas of a dish have got these little ridges and
lines going through them. And because your
aperture is going to be around F8 or F11, it's got enough depth
of field that that's probably going to
be in focus too. So I went in and I just
worked mainly on one photo. I worked on this one
and I actually did a blur technique
throughout the rest of the image and made
sure that the lines between the oil and the water
and this particular bubble, bubble, we're nice and sharp. That is the most important part. But I did have ridges
and lines running through here that I
needed to remove. So that's just one thing that I want you to watch out for. Actually, since we're
talking about it, let me just go ahead and
show you that really quick as a little bonus here, because I didn't touch on
that in the Photoshop video. I am going to deal with
these little ridges here. So I'm going to duplicate
my background just in case I like to do that so that I don't mess anything up terribly. Okay, so I'm gonna go up to Filter blur and I'm gonna
do a Gaussian blur. Now the amount that
I drag this out, you can see how you can
completely blurred. But if I did that, it would be pretty obvious where I have masked
that in and mask that out. So I'm actually
going to skip that. I'm going to come
down a little bit and just do like 24, 25 pixels. So it's not that dramatic. So I'm going to click Okay.
Kate Silvia, Photographer and Artist
