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Shoot for better composites by choosing your background first

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As an artist who shoots mostly composites, more often than not I’m going to be cutting out my subject and placing them in a different scene. A lot of the time I only have a rough idea of what kind of a background I’ll be using, so I just shoot my subject as best as I can and figure out the backdrop later. Sometimes I have no idea what I’m going to do with my model, but a wise and incredibly good-looking man once said, “You don’t always need a plan.”

HOWEVER, if I do a shoot knowing full well what my background looks like before I even pick up my camera, it makes everything a million times easier.

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Here is an easy tip for compositing hair like a ninja

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I wanted to share one of the images created for a tutorial I made, and chat a bit about one of my greatest compositing tips – hair extraction. You’re welcome. But if you’re all, “Thanks for the great tip about compositing Robert!”  … But that’s just not enough. I want to know more!” Then you can go buy my tutorial and help pay off my epic student loan debt ….

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Wacom’s entry-level Intuos tablets just got a huge new upgrade

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A graphics tablet is one of the most essential pieces of kit one can own as a photographer or retoucher. Sure, you can edit with a mouse, but a tablet makes life so much easier, and faster, and more accurate. While you’re often good with pretty much anything that has the Wacom name stamped on it, the really good ones have traditionally been rather expensive.

The Intuos is the low budget entry into the world of Wacom tablets, but they’re quite basic. And small. Now, though, with the new 2018 range of Intuos tablets, they’ve seen some pretty significant upgrades in size, sensitivity and capability.

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This simple Smart Object trick solves “Blend If” transparency issues in Photoshop

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Photoshop’s Blend If sliders are wonderfully useful and powerful tools. They allow us to seamlessly blend two images together with ease, or knock out elements of our images completely. But, they’re not without their quirks. One of those quirks is kind of a double-edged sword. The perk, and problem is that it takes adjustments you make to the image into account before it applies the blend.

This can be very handy when merging two different landscape images together, for example. But it can be completely useless for other purposes. In this 90 second video, Jesús Ramirez from the Photoshop Training Channel shows us a workaround for this. It’s a trick I often use myself for images here on DIYP, especially when compositing product photos onto new backgrounds.

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How to use light painting and compositing to make perfect car photographs

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Automotive photography is such a wide and varied field with a whole lot of options. There are so many different styles and techniques for photographing cars that there’s always something new or different to try. In this video, Bahraini photographer, Moe Zainal shows us one of his techniques which involves painting different areas of the car with flash in different photos, and then compositing in post.

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How to photograph glass perfume bottles with one light for compositing

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Photography Dustin Dolby is a great source of information for creating small product photography. Especially with minimal kit. He often uses just one or two speedlights to create multiple lighting setups, and then composites them in post. In this video, Dustin goes into a lot more detail about the actual shooting process and how he uses the light to build shape and form.

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How to make it snow in your photos and videos using Adobe After Effects

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Well, ’tis the season. Although some of us might be living in a winter wonderland, that’s not all of us. So, perhaps our videos need a little artificial assistance to give them some of that “Christmas spirit”. Well, this short video from Adobe shows us how we can add foreground and background snow to our scenes in just over a minute using Adobe After Effects.

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Photographers create magical scenes, bringing Christmas spirit to sick children across Australia

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Last year, The Christmas Wish Project put a smile on faces of sick children in Monash Children’s Hospital in Australia. This year, Karen Alsop and her team did it for children across Australia. With the help of photography, Photoshop and of course, Santa Claus, The heART Project made the holidays happier for children from 56 families.

This year, the project is bigger, and it involved a week of traveling across the country, along with hours of shooting and post-processing. Karen has shared the photos and more details with DIYP, and I’m happy to announce that the project will grow even bigger next year – it goes global!

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Use Photoshop’s Lighten blend mode to shoot high end product composites

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Shooting product photography is a whole lot of fun. Often, though, it can require a surprisingly high number of lights and modifiers to get the job done in a single shot. But what if you don’t have a ton of gear? What if you just want to give it a go without having to spend on a bunch of new flashes? Compositing is the answer.

In this video, Dustin Dolby from Workphlo uses just a single speedlight to show one process for creating composited product photographs. It’s a great technique for creating product composites with a perfectly clean white background with whatever subject light you need. As well as the basic shooting process, Dustin also goes over his entire post workflow.

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