Transcripts
1. Ghost Physics: Hey, I'm Tabitha. In this surreal photography class, I'm going to show you how to make people disappear. I'm sorry, was not super cheesy. Anyway, for this class project we need four things. A camera, a tripod, Photoshop and a model, any old human or animal will do. We're going to take two pictures and merging together in Photoshop to create an illusion of a ghost or an invisible person. It's going to be real Spooky. Yeah, let's bounce some ideas around. First things first, ghost physics. We need to figure out, do our ghosts wear clothes and are those clothes invisible or opaque? For me, I like to leave the clothing invisible so that you can definitely tell the person is see-through. If they're opaque, it's like you would see it in their face and in their hands, but that's it. It wouldn't be as effective photo. I make my clothes invisible, even though it probably is weird. Do ghosts eat food? If they do, is their food invisible or is their food opaque? For this one, I did a shoot with nuggets and I haven't edited it yet, so we'll see what ends up with that photo. I did another one with a cup of coffee and I left it opaque and it looked like an ad for Starbucks. I was like, no. I made it invisible too because I didn't want the coffee to be the main focus of the photo. Lastly, how do ghost interact with real life objects? If their hand were to touch something, would it go through it or would it hit it? For me, I like my ghosts to be able to interact with objects. If they sit down on a chair, I don't want them to fall through. I want them to be able to sit. For me, my ghosts are more like a famous wizard under an invisibility cloak. People ran into them, they would actually run into them. Ghosts are a little bit at risk of being trampled by humans and having humans have no idea what happens. That's an idea for another photo later. Yeah, so Ghost physics, figure out what exactly you think. It can change photo to photo, but if you're going to do like a series of images, I think it's probably important to decide what your rules are before you begin so that you have some guidelines. Yeah. Next, let's figure out how to come up with a good idea.
2. Inspiration and a Tripod: Once you get the physics nailed down, it's important to take some time and figure out what it is exactly that you want to tell in your story. Taking a photograph of a person in a scene and making them invisible, that's easy. Being able to lead the viewer through a captivating image and have an experience with the photo, and looking at it, and feeling it, and relating with it, that's a whole other thing. I urge you to take some time and figure out what story you want to convey. Include the background in the story, and try and find ways with expressions, and with other props or items to tell the story that you want to tell so that you can end up with the most effective looking photo. Another thing that's important to do is to utilize your space, and your time, and your models time. Here, you can see some footage from the session that I did at my local neighborhood McDonald's. These are my friends eating chicken nuggets and they are all going to be ghosts in this picture. I need a picture of them sitting at the table together and then, I need nothing to change, nothing to move except them. They need to get up out of the photo, I need the angle to stay the same, the lighting to stay the same, all the food on the table to stay the same, and then get that image there. Then basically, at this point, I could have just been like, all right guys, let's go. But I already had everybody there. We had our chicken nuggets, I thought, okay, let's explore this concept a little further. For here, I felt, let's do a shot where my sister and her boyfriend were sitting across from each other, and they're just having a good old time, and then their friends or just any old random person is at another table and they're just having a miserable time, they're humans or whatever, and so I wanted it to convey the story of, even though these two are technically not alive, they have more life in them than the people who are alive, who are just like, I don't know, messing around on their phones or just having a horrible day. It's this like playing into that matter of like, oh, we're wasting our lives on our phones and stuff. Anyway, then, we did an image where my sister and her boyfriend are sitting there and there are two other random people come up to sit down at the table because they don't see them, and so they were squirming away and these two were sitting down. Taking as many dynamic photos like this as you can in one session is a really good use of your time. Honestly, if you have an idea and you come with an idea, you'll photograph that and maybe the idea that you come up with second is better than the one you came up with first. Be receptive to other ideas that might come to you as you're shooting or on your way to your shoot, or you can even plan it out, these are different ideas I want to explore while we're shooting and see what works. Then you have a lot to choose from, and you can really put forth the best work that you were able to come up with at the time. That's it for ideas. What we need to make this photo are two images. We need to get a shot of the people or players in the scene, and then we need to keep the exact same scene with the same lighting, the same angle, just removing the people. Basically, what we are getting in the second photo is the information that's behind our people so that when we merge the two photos together, it does make them look invisible. A tripod is so important for this. I mean, you can try to hand hold it. But any movement is going to change how your images lineup. It's just going to make it way harder for you in Photoshop if you don't have a tripod. Get a tripod, make sure it's sturdy and it's not bumping around. If you put it on the table, make sure the table doesn't move. I had, in this McDonald setup, I had the table or the tripod on the table. This is a table that is one with the earth, it is not moving around anywhere. I don't have to worry about my hip running into it or anything like that. Definitely, get a tripod. If you don't have a tripod. I mean, you can try and do like the elbows on the table thing, and just hold really still, and try talk to your friends over your camera, but just get a tripod. You'll appreciate it so much more. Once you've got about 30 or so photos of your people in the scene, just enough that you feel confident that there's something there that you can use, it is important that you use manual focus on your scene shot. What I like to do is I use auto-focus to find my people, and then once they're in focus, I turn my lens to manual focus and I just leave it. I photograph my people, manually focused, and then when they get up, I do the same of the scene. That way, my camera is not focusing on the glass behind them, it's going to focus on about midway through the table and so it's going to have the same focal plane in the image as my first shot, so that when I line them up in Photoshop, I'm not having to deal with one background being [inaudible] and the other background being sharp and trying to match them up. Manual focus is super important or just keep in mind. Sometimes what I like to do is, if I'm not exactly sure where my person was in the plane, I'll just slowly rotate my lense as I take a bunch of photos, just panning through the scene. That way, I've got a lot of different backgrounds scenes to choose from if necessary. Once you've got your pictures taken, it's time to bring them into light room, edit them, and then put them into Photoshop to do the magic.
3. Disappearing Tutorial in Photoshop: Here I am in Lightroom. I've pre-selected all the photos that I want to edit and this is the one we are going to start with. Here's my image with the four of them sitting at the table. I chose this one because I liked how they were all staring at the camera, almost mysteriously like they have a secret, which is that they're actually ghosts and for whatever reason they can see the camera. We are going to take this image and it's scene counterpart and pull these into Photoshop. I've already pre-edited these images, so this one started out straight out the camera like this,. It's a bit dark, it's a bit desaturated, so I just added some lightness, some contrasts and saturation. I use the Spot Removal tool to get rid of any distracting spots. Then as you can see right there, watching their faces, I added a brushstroke to brighten up their faces so that each of their faces are about the same exposure. Yeah, so now we want to make sure that our background image looks the same so I just copied the settings for my first image and pasted them onto this one. It ended up a little bit too light and so I had to take the exposure down just a little bit to get it to match. I think we did a good job. We've got some weird shadows on the table we'll have to deal with but, for now, we can take these two photos into Photoshop. I select both. I do that by selecting one, holding down Shift and then clicking the next one so both are selected. Right-click, Export. You go to the one with the dot, dot, dot. I'm just going to put it in my Ghost sub-folder. I'm going to call it McDonalds serious so I know which one it is and then we want a JPEG. I'm not going to limit the file size and I'm not going to resize the image. It's just going to be its normal, regular size. My sharpening settings, I sharpen for screen and then just use the standard amount and then I want to just go ahead and change post-processing, do nothing to open in Adobe Photoshop CC 2017. I open it in Adobe Photoshop and it's a JPEG and it's exported. I will have an exported copy in my folder and it'll pull it up in Photoshop. There is a selection where you can right-click and then edit in Photoshop, but what you're editing is the raw file, so it's going to be like a dot nef. It pulls a different color profile. I want to keep it the same color profile, the same bit depth and I feel like exporting it as a JPEG and starting with a JPEG while I edit is just the best way for me. Here we are in Adobe Photoshop. I've got these, each photo opened in a different tab. I need both of these to be in the same tab so what I'm going to do is I'm going to take the photo with my friends and move it. Right now it's a background layer and it's locked. If I double-click, I can click "Okay". It changes the name to Layer 0 and unlocks it so it's no longer a background layer. Right now I have my Move tool selected, but if I didn't, let's say I had the brush automatically selected, if you hit V, it'll change it to the Move tool. You can remember that because move has a V in it, so V to the Move tool. You click and drag, it's going to pull this right over the tab. It'll switch tops and then we're just going to unclick it right on top so you can see it's not matched up, but it's here. What we can do to try and match it up, we want to come over here into the layers channel, make sure layer one, the one that you just moved with the people in it, is selected, we're going to drop our opacity down to 50 percent so that makes them transparent. Already it's done, but the reason I do this at first is so that you can line up the picture. If it looks like this, you're like, "Oh, obviously these two bench spots aren't lined up." We would just want to bring that in and make sure it's nice and snug. What I like to do is zoom in really close so if you hold down the Alt key and then scroll in, you can zoom to get to a detail. You can see the edge of this table is off. With V, we still have the Move tool activated. I'm just going to hit my arrow key and scoop this top photo right into place. It's aligned with the table right here. I'm going to zoom out by hitting Alt and scrolling out. I'm going to pick a different spot in the photo and make sure it is close. The bench has moved a little bit. That could be because they got up so if he's leaning up against the bench, it can shift it there. Just make sure it's as aligned as possible. Honestly, nobody's going to notice this bench spot, I did because I zoomed in all the way, but nobody's going to zoom in all the way. Basically we're done. This is it. We've got the picture. There's a few things that you can do to make it a little bit better. Sweet Addy right here, her face has been severed in half by the dark window border. You can leave this or you can mess with it a little bit. I'm going to make the top layer invisible while I work on this section. I'm going to use my polygon. What is this thing called? Polygonal lasso tool. I'm going to select this dark area just by clicking, making a selection. I'm going to select around the bench. Just not even very amazingly. Going to come over here, up, I'm just taking this window strip and I'm just going to get rid of it. There we have it. It is all selected and I'm not going to bother selecting the side unless it needs it so right now I'm just going to focus on where Addy's face is. What I can do is, I can take the Brush tool, so if I hit B, the brush shows right here, I've got that selected. It doesn't want me to draw here. Let's see. Here we go. Because I need the background layer selected so now I can draw. I'm going to change my brush mode to just a regular brush with 100 percent hardness. I'm going to change the size to 60-ish. Cool. Then you can also adjust the size using the bracket keys. Small bracket, makes the thing smaller, big bracket makes the thing bigger. I clicked on the color, let me do that again for you. I clicked on this black color that opens up my color picker. You can either pick a color like this or you can pick a color in the scene. I'm going to pick this silver color along this trim right here. You can see it's really close to white actually. I'm going to go a little darker just because we don't want it to be like really bright. Cool. We've got this muddy brown, gray color. That's perfect. I'm going to hit "Okay", and your opacity should by default be set to 100. I'm going to drop it to 50 percent because we just want to tone it down a little bit. I am just going to paint this guy and then we're going to make our layer visible again and see if that helped. I'm looking just at her face, I'm going to go back from before my brush tool and then back into my brush tool. I love it okay. I feel like that toned it down just a little bit. Not enough that it's like what happened to this photo, but enough that her face doesn't look as weird. Now I'm going to hit Command D to deselect and I'm happy with how that looks. I like where the lines hit on her face and the red, I think that looks cool. You can definitely tell you can see through it. However, her nose looks really dark so you can see that just happens to be a dark spot in the window. I am just going to take my brush tool and paint that. Don't do that. Let's see. Let's try the Dodge tool. Dodge tool will lighten so I'm going to resize my brush and then just lighten this up just a little bit. You can see that's before, this is after. Let's see if it helped. I think so. It's a little bit red so I'm actually going to pull up my Paintbrush tool and pick this nice green color and then resize it and paint it with just a little bit. I'm dropping down to 20 percent opacity. I'm also going to take the hardness down so my brush is soft around the edges instead of making a solid line. I'm just going to paint that ever so slightly. Now we're going to activate this layer again and it looks a lot better. Here's before with her face, you can see it's dark right here and then here is after so I just lightened it up just a little bit. That's semi-intense edit and you don't have to do all this stuff. Her face has the reflection of a car behind it, which is cool. I'm actually going to leave that. Then his face looks good. It's got this really strong line coming into it so I'm actually going to get rid of that too because it's pretty distracting. I disabled my first layer, my background layer, I'm going to go back into my Polygonal lasso tool, I'm going to drag, basically cutting this out of the rest of the picture so that when I use my brush tool, so hit B for your Brush tool, and then I'm going to change the size. When I get to my Brush tool, it'll just color in between where I've got my dotted lines. We don't want a green, we are going to make it the same color as the other one and make it just a bit lighter. Color that in. Okay. Let's check it out. That looks much better. It's just a little more subtle. I'm going to hit Command D to deselect. We can see all of their faces. Their faces are distinct and they're sitting at the table, but the table is there and they are not so we have our ghost picture in the bag. Another thing that you can do, is just a little tiny tweak, is select your layer one and then change your opacity. You can make them a little less see-through so drag it up to 70 percent. We can still see through them, but you can see that they're there so this one is a little more subtle. If you want them to be almost completely on, you can drop it down to 25 and there's just a whisper of people in this image. I usually like to stick around 50 because I'm indecisive and I like that it's just like a solid number. Looks good. Then this is your final image. Then if I wanted to share this on Instagram, you can't see this, but there's a file bar up here. You hit File. We're going to go to image. We're going to go to image size. I'm changing the image size from 6,000 pixels wide and to 2,500. I'm leaving the resolution at 240 and I do by cubic sharper best for reduction. With 2500 in the width, I picked width because that's the long edge. I like my long edge to be 2,500 pixels, Resolution 240. That shrink my photo. I'm going to go to File Save As, and then I would save it in my ghost folder so McDonald's serious number two, JPEG. I'm actually going to save this as final and save. My JPEG options, if I'm uploading to Skillshare, 2.4 is too big, I just pull it down until it's less than 1.8. Now this is good for your Skillshare, it's great for Instagram. I just email it to myself and then post it on Instagram and that's how we do it.
4. Lightroom Edit and Photoshop: Here we have this picture where they're like on a date and then these two over here just doing whatever, being sad. I need to edit this picture still. Instead of cheating and copying my edit from over here, I will handed at this so that you can watch. This picture is a little dark. I'm going to lighten it just a little bit, not so much that her face disappears. I'm going to drag up the contrast because I love a nice contrasted image, especially when I'm shooting an RA. I'm going to pull up the shadows. This will bring up the dark areas of this photo, especially over here, the black. I'm going to bring down just a hair. I'm going to kick up the vibrance and saturation. This time I'm bringing them up to about 10, there will fit like nineish. Then I'm going to drag my shadows down, drive my darks up. I feel like this is getting pretty close. I'm going to add a little more contrast and change the color temperature. It's really yellow over here in the shadows, but it's really blue in the highlights. I'm going to just make an arbitrary decision and make it a little bit warmer. My cute sister's face is really bright. I'm going to actually take it down. I just went into this hand edit tool, this mask draw thing and I changed it to burn darken. I'm just going to pull this over her face darken it up just a little, that's too much. I'm going to bring the exposure up to like 19. I'm actually going to brighten his face just a little. I'm going to go up to lighten, change the size using the scroll wheel and just lighten that shadow area right there. I'm going to just take it down just a little because it was a bit much 23, that's good. Here is my image pretty satisfied with how it looks. I need to also put this edit onto this image, so we're going to copy it and then come over here, paste it, then let's flip back and forth and make sure the lighting didn't really change. Yes, that's close enough. Alright, now we're going to take both of these into photoshop. Clicking one, clicking shift, clicking the next one, right click Export. Same sub folder, Mcdonald's serious photo number two, scrolling down, we're going to not re-size it. We are going to sharpen it. We're going to open it in Adobe photoshop as our post processing export. Here we are in photoshop. We've got our image with these two and we've got our image without them. We are going to take them and pull them into the other photo. I'm going to double-click like background, hit okay. This unlocks the layer so I can move it now, I have my brush tool selected, I'm going to hit V for move and I'm going to drag this right over into the other tab and plop it on top, there we go. In order to align it, I'm going to drop my opacity down to 50 percent, you can see we're close. I'm going to get pretty close and then I will zoom in to fine tune. I will work on the table. The bench moves a little bit, its hard to align that, but the table is solid. You can see we've got a little bit of a distance to move it. I have my move tool still selected with V. I'm going to just hit the arrow keys and move the table until it lines up. Just right. Awesome. This picture is aligned. What we have going on here is they are ghosts, which is great, but these two are moved, like they have moved, so they look weirdly blurry. What you need to decide is, which pose you like better, so there's one where we can see they're both looking down at their phones and then the other one, you can see her face to the side. She looks tired and then her face peeking over. This image is more flattering of them. I'm just going to go with this one. I have my layer one selected. I'm going to drop the opacity back down just so I know which one is which, then I'm actually going to take lasso tool, this polygonal lasso. I'm going to cut this part of the photo out, so that we don't see their faces in the second orientation. Here I am just doing a rough cut just making sure to get between her elbow and then go all the way up and complete the circle. Right now we have this selected, I got layer one and that's the layer that I want to remove of this. I'm just going to hit right-click layer via cut. That chopped it off. I'm just going to deselect it and here's what we have. We can clearly see a really harsh line right here from where the shadow is no longer there. What I like to do is make sure I have layer one selected. I'm going to hit E for eraser. I'm going to check and make sure I want my hardness to be at zero. That'll be a nice soft eraser. My opacity is 13, I'm going to bring it up to 50. That way it doesn't erase the whole thing and just erases most of it. I'm changing my size with my bracket keys. The right bracket makes it bigger, left bracket makes it smaller. I'm just going to paint a little bit to blend these two scenes. Keep in mind, I'm erasing this half because there's nothing here in this layer to erase. I could erase over here all day long and nothing would happen, but if I erase over here, her face starts to disappear. I'm just going to undo alt Z and then or control alt Z, I guess I'm just going to erase that harsh line away so that blends really smoothly. If you click to erase and then let go and click again, it'll erase on top of where you erased before and it'll get away from the 50 percent opacity. Instead of erasing only half, it'll erase half of what's there and progressively more erasing. You can see my sweet background doesn't quite match up. I'm just going to freely erase up in here to make that look a little smoother.. Nobody is going to zoom in this close, but I'll know. I'm going to erase to make that nice and even and I think we're probably good here. You can see what that did was it took out this blurry look over here and it made them look sharp. The only problem is, well, I guess he's got his elbow here and he's got a very distinctly weird pink shirt on. I could erase his elbow so that it wasn't in the picture, but I don't mind that the idea that there's more people over there and I don't think most people are going to be like, "oh my gosh, there's two of him." That's something you can do if you want to do it, but I'm not going to do it because I don't care. We've got our cute little people here and it just happened that their faces are in spots that worked out. I don't mind this pole going through her head because it's the back of her head. It's not really that big of a deal and it plays more into the fact that she is very clearly invisible. One thing that's nice is if you have them leaning into the table, you can see the table through their arms and I think that helps convey the idea that they are invisible, being able to see through them on these straight line areas. Yeah I actually love how this one turned out. I think it has a really fun, playful mood to it. I would call this one a success.
5. Fully Erased Ghosting: All right, for my next trick, I wanted to show you how to do a surreal type photo where half of the person's body is just simply gone. It's not invisible looking, it's just gone. For this image, we've got my friend coming out of a picture frame. She's climbing out maybe from another dimension. She could even be falling in depending on how you look at him. But we are implying that there's something strange going on, whether it's just a floating picture filling frame with hands coming out of it or the idea of that she's somewhere else and she's entering this world. Somehow is where we're going here. It's just a little bit creepy to look at. It makes people wonder, what's going on, how did they do this? We started out with this photo, here I have her holding up this frame with her hands. She's balancing it to keep up and her head is down like she's trying to climb out. I've got her kneeling on the ground because I wanted to have the ground in the picture as a reference, so I considered cropping the photo like this without the grass so that it was more of this solid blue background. I decided to leave the ground and as a good source of reference. By having her kneel down, she's able to be a lot closer to the ground and it makes you just really wonder what's happening here. Here's the image, you can see her sweet dog is in the front, she's like, what's happening? Anyways, she is climbing through this picture frame. What I need to do is erase everything that is on or the outside of the picture frame, I should say. The stuff that's coming through it, her hands and the stuff that's inside it, her head that we keep and then everything else to create the solution we need to erase. Of course need to have a background photo, so this is an image of the scene. With these two photos, we want to merge them together. To start out, I'm going to double-click on the background layer so that it's a workable layer, it's not locked anymore. I'm going to hit V for move. Move has a V in it. That's how you remember the move tool. I'm going to grab this whole picture and drag it right on top of the other one in the other tab. I am going to drop my opacity 50 percent. We're not making her invisible in this one, at this point, we're just trying to merge up our backgrounds. This one's going to be really tricky because the train moves a little bit in the wind also about makes me super dizzy to look at. I'm going to merge up these two little pine cones just clicking and dragging and once I've got it pretty close, I'm just scrolling through here to see what we've got. We'll merge up the grass a little. I'm actually going to find tune. I've got my move tools activated, but I'm using the left and right keys. I think we got it. I'm going to zoom out, and then what we need to do is make her full opacity again and start selecting. This tool takes a little bit of a process. Basically I just use this polygon, a lasso tool and I start cutting out. My path basically is I'm going to cut around this frame, around her hands up, and then I'm just going to cut her body and her dog's head out of the photo and then end my selection and delete it. I'm going to do that really quick and fast motion so you don't have to like synopsis boring process. All right. Now that I have the whole thing selected, I can honestly just hit the delete key and it will completely get rid of that layer. Since I might need this layer later, I'm just going to cut it. Right-click "Layer Via Cut", it pulls what I've selected out of my first image and so I can just turn off the visibility. Now what we have is pretty close to what we're going to end up with. Here in this dark patch, that's her shadow. Then since she wasn't in this part of the picture, she doesn't have a shadow. I need to find a way to blend that. I am going to have layer one selected, that's where it's dark. Actually I'm just going to delete where her shadow is here in the grass and delete this watch. I'm going to go to E for erase, this is my eraser tool. I can hit the right bracket to make it bigger and the left bracket to make it smaller. I'm going to make it a little bit bigger. I have it set to 50 percent opacity, so it's going to erase half of the information here and the hardness is set to zero. It's a nice soft eraser. I am just going to come on in here and erase this darkness in the grass away. I'm going to erase her watch away, and there we have it, pretty easy. I did a little bit of tweaking on it when I did it originally. For instance, let's go ahead and I have my background layer selected, I'm going to go over here and select my Burn Tool, I'm going to make it a little bit bigger. The Burn Tool basically just darkens the image. I'm just going to come in here and just darken the grass. I don't want go too hard. Just evening out this grass here. In fact, this little patch I'm just going to get rid of. I'm going to go up here to my spot healing brush, looks like a little band-aid, make it a little bigger, click on it and it will sample from around to make it basically a little patch. Here we have it. This is our image and we're all done. That was easy. This is a really effective photo. The longest part is cutting out this edge. But if you've got a nice straight lines or not hair, you don't want to cut around hair here. It's the worst thing to try and cut around. I'm not very good at all. But for this, we just had the edge of the frame and her fingers to cut out in it really wasn't that bad at all. This point I would size it down, sharpen it, save it, post it online and call it a day.
6. Advanced Composites: Lastly, I wanted to take you through how I was able to craft this image and this image. I feel like these have a huge effect in the way that they tell a story. They're very intensely edited. I didn't want to lead you through my real-time edit because these took me so long. I'm not the best at this kind of intense Photoshop manipulation, but I wanted to at least lead you through the building blocks that it took me to get to these images. At first, we found a good spot on this trail where she could line up with the road, I wanted the road to go through her. My sister last year had some pretty intense stomach ulcers. I called this image "traffic ulcers". I thought it probably felt like onto a car driving through your organs. That's the metaphor that brought this image to life. To start out, we got a bunch of photos of her standing by the road. Our goal here was to get an ideal expression. I chose this one because it was contemplative and mysterious, and I loved the way the wind picked her hair up to add that vibe, that cool look to it, I guess. I needed her to hold her shirt, to imagine her shirt had a hole in it right here, and that we could see all the way through it. I had her grab up and just scrunched up some of her sweater and just hope that what I was getting was going to be workable. Then also this sheet in the corner, I did not need it to be in the photo. I should've taken it out of the frame but I didn't. I was like, I'll just photoshop it out later and that was annoying. Definitely be mindful of your whole scene, so you don't have to spend countless hours editing out things that could have been moved in two seconds. Anyway, we got her facial expression and then we also took this image. This one, we didn't love the facial expression, but I loved the cars. I ended up using the cars in the final edit. This is my background scene. It's just really clean, crisp, I got a few of these. I had a really small aperture so that I could capture a lot of the scene. I didn't want the road to be blurry as it went through her because I felt like that wouldn't seem very real, and my decision to have a narrow aperture was very intentional. I probably set this to like F/22, F/18, something pretty high up there so that I could get a lot of the scene in focus and really help this photo be like mind-bending in that way. Lastly, we got a shot of them, my sister and her boyfriend holding up this sheet, stretching it. We actually ripped a hole in it, and then stretched it over the street so that I could use this area of the photo if I needed to make it more believable. I wasn't sure how I was going to cut a hole through her stomach, and so having an actual hole photographed was a good idea for us. This photo is really annoying to take because of the shadows, but we ended up with a good one that I could use in our final edit. For this also, the original image has this rail going through the left side of the road, and when I tried to make that go through her, it just looked so unrealistic. It looked like I just cut up the image and it just didn't look very good. I noticed up here further up the road, there's not a rail on this side. I felt like, I could easily Photoshop this out so that it looked better in my final image, and it worked. That was an edit well worth my time. Also, I wanted to talk about her hands. This hand is an original from the photo with this expression, this hand, I actually took from the image of the sheet. You can see her hand, we've got the sun hitting it. You can see her rings and then the original photo, her fist is turned more toward the camera and it's just a different shot. I felt like, being able to use this area of the photo really helped. I liked how these wrinkles looked in the image, and then lastly, it was really hard to match up the colors. The sheet is a lot bluer than her sweater. I had to do a lot of blending work in here, and I made this look like it was rolled and frayed. I just had to kind of do a lot of painting in this part of the photo. It doesn't look super good close up, but nobody's going to scroll in close. Mostly, we've got our concept, it looks believable and I'm really happy with how this one turned out. Next, we have our ghost on the longboard picture. This one, I had in my mind for a while. I wanted to be able to convey that there was a person underneath the sheet and that they were invisible, but when acted upon by an external object, you could see them. I liked the way his hand looked here because you can tell there's an actual person under there, instead of just like a form or coat hanger or something. This image, I thought came together really, really well. Here is the original. You can see I've got his legs, my sister is actually behind him, with her foot on the longboard holding it in place. Because we're actually on a slope and he was rolling away, while we were trying to take pictures. One thing that I was not super happy about, was we had his hand sticking out here and I knew that I was going to have to take that in to Photoshop and do some pretty heavy manipulation. His eyes are peeking through, I didn't love so we ended up cutting these holes while we were there with like emergency kit safety scissors. They're a little ragged. In the final edit, I ended up rounding out those holes and darkening them, so that it was very obvious this was a ghost look that we were going for. Here is how his hand turned out when I ended up taking it out. I wanted to preserve this edge of the sheet, I actually had to draw the scene back in, and I did a lot of Clone stamping to try and get a believable shape here. Probably, the easiest part of this image, was taking the feet out of the background. You can see what I had to deal with was, getting her feet from under the skateboard on top of the skateboard, his feet, his legs. One thing to keep in mind if you're taking a photo like this is, the sheet is a lot shorter in the front, which means if this were to actually hang behind him, I would have to make up the sheet that would have been behind his legs if that makes sense. Because the wind caught it and pull that back end this way, I don't have a sheet right behind him, I was able to easily cut this part of the photo out and not have too much trouble with it. If you're going to do a photo like this, just make the front a lot longer so that you don't have multiple layers of sheets to try and edit out. Yeah, we took out the beer box from the background. This is our background shot. This one I used a really shallow depth of field because I wanted that ghost to pop out. You can see our rolling hill in the background is pretty blurry, this weed in the front is blurry, and it really helped separate the ghost from the backdrop. Which is the opposite effect of what I wanted in this one, where I wanted her and the backdrop to become one. Yeah, these are how they turned out. I hope that this was helpful, and thanks so much for watching.
7. Final Thoughts: That's it. Thanks so much for taking my class. I really appreciate it. I hope that you learned something. If you didn't learn anything, I hope that at least you had fun. [LAUGHTER] Feel free to post any questions or comments that you might have in the discussion section, and share your project in the project section so I can take a look. If you decide to share your images on Instagram, tag me so that I can come see them. My tag is just tabithapark. Yeah. That's all I have for you. I'll see you next time.
Tabitha Park, Product & Food Photographer
