From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

884 Faking a GoPro over-under shot

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

884 Faking a GoPro over-under shot

- Hey, gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. Today I'm standing onboard what was formerly a naval vessel here in beautiful Paradise Bay in Antarctica where I'm learning what it means to scuba dive and snorkel in very, very cold water. What does that have to do with today's technique? Well, in preparation for this trip, I went to a place called Hornby Island in British Columbia where the water was a relatively balmy 37 degrees Fahrenheit as opposed to here where it's what I formerly knew as freezing. In any event, Hornby Island is the perfect place to capture stellar sea lions like these guys right here. Now, this is what's known as an over/under shot, because you can see over and under the water at the same time. I captured this photo using a GoPro Hero 8, which is no small feat, because this thing has a very small lens that's barely larger than the surface area of the water. Plus, the water was very choppy and my friendly, several hundred pound pinnipeds kept bashing into me. Which is why this isn't technically a single photograph. It's actually a combination of four frames from a single movie that I composited to get a, together, that is, inside Photoshop. What? You didn't know I did that? That's what I do. Here, let me show you a rare instance, in which I totally fake the scene using real photographic elements in Photoshop. All right, so here we are in Adobe Bridge, just so we have a chance to see what we have to work with. I'll press Control + A or Command + A on a Mac to select all of these images. And then I'll press the spacebar in order to switch to the full screen preview mode. This is the fake over/under shot, by the way. The four frame composition. And these are some actual frames that I captured using a GoPro Hero 8. So this is actually a fairly authentic over/under shot. We just don't have much over to work with. You may notice we're seeing this guy's eye over here. But this might come in handy for these out of focus highlights. Then we've got another authentic over/under shot. It's just not all that remarkable. But you can see how these sea lions are pretty friendly. They come right at the camera. And then I've got this over shot where they're friendlier still. And then I have the under. And so we're going to combine them all together by first pressing the Escape key and then I'll Shift + Click on this guy so we've got all four of the JPEG images selected. I have not selected the layered PSD file. And then I'll go up to the tools menu, choose Photoshop, and choose this command right here, Load Files into Photoshop Layers. And that's going to automatically combine these images into a single composition. And you can see that Photoshop orders the layers in alphabetical order. And that's why I named them this way. So highlight is at the top, and under is at the bottom. And now what I'm going to do is expand the size of my canvas by going up to the Image menu and choosing the Canvas Size command. And notice, if I turn off the Relative checkbox, and assuming that my unit of measure is set to pixels, that the width value is set to 3840. And so again, these are just frames that I lifted from a GoPro movie. I want this image to be square, so I'll change the height value to 3840 as well. And I'll go ahead and select this top anchor point so that we're going to expand the canvas downward. And I'll click OK. All right, now what we need to do is move these images around a little. Now, I did this just by trial and error, but I came up with some specific settings. And so I'm going to select the under layer right there. And then I'll go up to the Edit menu and choose Free Transform. Or you have that keyboard shortcut of Control + T here on the PC or Command + T on a Mac. And now what you want to do is make sure up here in the Options bar that this check mark is turned on so that you have control over this target right here. And then you want to select the top-left point in this tiny anchor point matrix. And then go ahead and select the Y value. And I actually want to click on the Y to select it. And I'll change that value to 1760 like so, which is going to force that under image downward. Then I'll press the Enter key or the Return key on a Mac a couple of times to accept that change. Now you want to select the lip layer. And I'm going to take advantage of that keyboard shortcut of Control + T or Command + T on a Mac for Free Transform. Select that top-left point in the anchor point matrix and change the Y value this time around to 880, is what I'm looking for. Then I'll press the Enter key or the Return key on a Mac a couple of times to accept that change. And I'll select the highlight layer up here at the top and I will once again press Control + T or Command + T on a Mac in order to invoke Free Transform. And I'll select the top-left reference point once again. And I'll go ahead and select the Y value, and I'll change it this time around to 1155, should work out nicely. And I'll press the Enter key or the Return key on a Mac a couple of times to accept that change. All right, I'm going to turn the highlight layer off for a moment. Then I'll go ahead and select the lip layer. I want you to see, if I turn that layer off, that we've got the over image up above and the under image down below. And so I'll turn the lip layer back on again, make sure it's selected. Then you want to drop down to the Add Layer Mask icon at the bottom of the Layers panel. And instead of clicking on it, which would create a white layer mask, which would show everything, we want to Alt or Option + Click on it, and that will create a black layer mask that hides everything. All right, now what you want to do is select the Brush tool. Which you can get by pressing the B key. And notice, if I right-click inside the image window, that I've cranked my size value up to 500 pixels, my hardness value is 0%. So I want a nice, soft brush stroke. And then for a nice, smooth brush stroke, go up to the Window menu and choose Brush Settings and set the spacing value, this guy right here, to something like 10%, should work out nicely. All right, I'm going to go ahead and hide that panel. And I'll tap the D key to invoke my default foreground and background colors, which, when you're working with the layer mask, are white for the foreground and black for the background. Which means I can now paint in that water line like so. And you can just paint it pretty free form. It's up to you how you want it to look. If we have a little bit of a highlight up at the top, for example. Maybe a little additional shadow down here at the bottom. Now, what you have to be careful about is repeating any of the actual sea lion detail down here below the water line. Which I am doing as you can see here, so I'll press the X key to swap my foreground and background colors, so my foreground color is now black. And I'll just go ahead and paint like so in order to get rid of some of that extra seal flesh. All right, now I still have a little right here. And you want to make sure, more than anything else, that you're not seeing the hard edge between these two layers. Between the over and under layers. And so I'll bring this guy back. Notice that I am seeing a hard edge right there. I do not want that. That's a very big problem. So I'll reduce the size of my cursor a little bit by pressing the left bracket key. I'll press the X key to swap my foreground and background colors, so my foreground color is once again white. And I'll paint away that edge. And we've got a bunch of edge right here, actually. So I'm going to paint all this stuff away. So that is a giveaway. A sharp line between the over and under shots would, I think, imply to even the most casual observer that this is a faked composition. All right, so the big problem here is that I'm seeing this kind of fleshy tone right here. I'm see a little bit of sea lion flesh. And so what I'm going to do in order to cover that up is I'm going to click on the FX icon down here at the bottom of the Layers panel, and I'm going to choose Color Overlay. And notice, I came up with these settings here. So I'll click on the color swatch. Notice that the Hue value is 180 degrees, so cyan. Saturation is 100%, and Brightness is 50%. At which point I'll click OK. Now, you could set the Blend Mode to color, but if you do that, you're going to get some very bright colors as we're seeing right here. So instead, I'll go ahead and change it to Hue, which is going to observe the original saturation values. And then I took the Opacity value down to 77%, just because it's easy to enter two sevens in a row. And I'll click OK to accept that change. All right, now we want to introduce some additional highlights here, so I'll turn on the highlight layer right there. Select it by clicking on it. And then drop down to the Add Layer Mask icon at the bottom of the Layers panel, and Alt or Option + Click on it once again in order to hide the contents of the layer, for starters anyway. And now I'll just go ahead and paint in some of these highlights like so. And you can paint in as much as you like. So you can do whatever looks good to you. I'm going to press Control + 0 or Command + 0 on a Mac to zoom out. You might notice that this looks terrible at this point, which is why I'm going to go over here to the Blend Mode popup menu in the top-left corner of the Layers panel, and change it to Screen in order to produce this effect here. So this is how things look without those highlights. This is how things look with them. And now I'll go ahead and increase the size of my cursor a little bit by pressing the right bracket key. And I'll paint in a few additional details like so, which I think helps to create a more realistic effect. If you feel like you're going too far, you can always just press the X key to swap your foreground and background colors, so that your foreground color is black, and you can paint the offending details away. All right, I'm going to press the X key again, cause I want to paint in some additional details down here just so that this doesn't look like too sharp of an edge. And now I'll press Shift + F in order to switch to the full screen mode. And I'll go ahead and zoom in as well. And that's how you create a dramatic, if entirely fake, over/under composition by assembling a bunch of frames from a GoPro movie here inside Photoshop. Now tell me that wasn't awesome. Makes you want to run out there and engage in all kinds of Photoshop fakery doesn't it? Besides, Deke's Techniques isn't about ethics, people. It's about making cool stuff regardless of the consequences. But whatever you think of it so far, it could be better. Which is why if you're a member of LinkedIn Learning, I have a followup movie in which I show you how to take this image and make it look its absolute best inside Camera Raw. Deke's Techniques each and every week. Keep watching.

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