Welcome to the 22nd week of Shoot and Edit: Part 2. Click HERE for all the details and upcoming prompts/themes (also including previous editing tutorials). This week’s theme or prompt was to show us one “Bubbles” SOOC shot (this was just a suggestion, you can show us any SOOC shot). Hopefully you linked up with Jill’s blog earlier this week.
Each Thursday, I will take my SOOC shot and provide some basic editing tips. You can then try these tips on your own photos and link up here – linky will now open EARLY on Thursdays and be open THROUGH SUNDAY. If you’d prefer, can simply share your own edit and show us what you did to achieve the look. We want this challenge to be a learning experience, so feel free to teach us something new too! Also, it does not matter what editing program you use. Although I tend to work within Adobe CS5 (Photoshop), Photoshop Elements and Adobe Camera Raw…it does not mean that you have to use the exact same program. I hope you’ll be able to take the concepts and apply them in the program you feel most comfortable using.
Today I’ll share a video on rendering bubbles, but first…here’s my SOOC again.
So, building on what we’ve learned in the past 20 weeks (Week 1: Edit, Week 2: Edit, Week 3A, Week 3B, Week 4: Edit, Week 5: Edit, Week 6: Edit, Week 7: Edit, Week 8: Edit, Week 9: Edit, Week 10: Edit, Week 11: Edit, Week 12: Edit, Week 13: Edit, Week 14: Edit, Week 15: Edit, Week 16: Edit, Week 17: Edit, Week 18: Edit, Week 19: Edit, Week 20: Edit, and Week 21: Edit) I started my edit by opening my photo in Adobe Camera Raw and running a nice clean edit.
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| ACR Adjustment |
A creative shot like this one can go multiple directions. I actually like the abstract feel of the original shot so I quickly ran the Coffeeshop Blog’s Perfect Portrait 3 (because I’m madly in love with that action right now) and merged my layers (obviously after adjusting the layers to my liking).
In particular, if you’ve recently started linking up…I used my favorite trick: duplicate layer > high pass filter > soft light blending mode. I also needed to use the healing tool (covered in Week 19’s edit) to remove the scratch on my glass.
From that point, I decided to try a trick I saw the other day when I was looking for “bubble inspiration.” I thought if I wasn’t going to blow bubbles that I could at least show you how to render bubbles. Of course, now that I’ve gone through the steps…I’ll probably never use this technique, but it was worth trying (right? said in my most convincing tone).
The key in this tutorial is that you must have a good, clean bubble handy. While you can probably find something on Flickr or Google images, I decided to ask Kimberly from My Perspective if I could use her image from Monday. Thanks Kimberly!
Once you’ve selected your bubble, you move it on top of your image into a dark space. Create two duplicates of the bubble. The first bubble layer should be set to lighten, the second bubble layer set to screen and the last bubble layer set to soft light. You’ll want to play around with the opacities. I then decided to use my clone tool to clone some bubbles from my original image into the rendered bubble to mimic a reflection. I also pulled some of the color from the original image. This whole process is a bit advanced although not impossible at all…you’ll just want to pull all of our previous lessons together: layer masks, cloning, healing, etc. Here’s my final image…what do you think? Too weird?
So, to recap our lesson, we discussed rendering bubbles. For your edit, I would love to see you continuing using the lessons we’ve covered in the past 21 weeks. You might even consider rendering a bubble on your image…okay, I really don’t expect that. However, I would love to hear about your favorite “processing” techniques.
I hope you found today’s lesson useful and I hope you have a great Thursday! If you have any questions or need more explanation, don’t hesitate to contact me. Next week’s theme is “Swing/Slides.”
I hope you found today’s lesson useful and I hope you have a great Thursday! If you have any questions or need more explanation, don’t hesitate to contact me. Next week’s theme is “Swing/Slides.”
