RP LIVE Atmospherics Scott Valentine (rebroadcast)

[Doug Nelson]

Join us for our next RetouchPRO LIVE rebroadcast as author and physicist Scott Valentine shows you how to add light rays, fog, rain, and areal perspective to your images.

Wednesday, July 28, 2pm CDT (see link below for other time zones)

Click the following link for details and ticket sales:
http://www.retouchpro.com/index.php?page=rebroadcast

[Doug Nelson]

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[Doug Nelson]

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Come back to this thread after the show and tell us your thoughts about it. Also, give us your requests for future shows with Scott Valentine.

[bmcfadzean]

Hi Doug,

This was my first broadcast, even though its a re-broadcast I thought it was good to at least have a look to see what it is all about. Haha I was keen getting up at 4am to watch this....note to self get more sleep.

The only real question that I have for Scott and perhaps yourself is how does he actually set up the initial setting for the dust layer. I believe from my notes is that he had an curve adjustment layer? Something on the lines of knocking out (some specific) detail. Possibly the mid-point? and reduce local contrast?

Thanks for your time,

Brock

[sfreund]

Hi

I enjoyed this session but had trouble logging into Go to Webinar and lost the first 12 minutes. By the time I logged in, those all-important first setup steps had already been covered. All I caught was something about a white layer (set to what blending mode?) and a gray fill layer (set to Overlay perhaps?), some blurring (but not sure at what point that gets done).... but for the rest of the webinar Scott and Doug just kept referring to "the steps I showed you in the beginning."

Could anyone, or Doug, please tell me briefly, but exactly, what those steps were, their proper sequence (if any), their blending modes, what gets blurred, and what's the difference b/w the white and the gray fill layers? Also, what he was doing with the H/S layers?

If this is too much to ask for, I'd be happy with anything that people remember from this portion of the rebroadcast.

Many thanks in advance.

[lokki]

Originally Posted by bmcfadzean

The only real question that I have for Scott and perhaps yourself is how does he actually set up the initial setting for the dust layer. I believe from my notes is that he had an curve adjustment layer? Something on the lines of knocking out (some specific) detail. Possibly the mid-point? and reduce local contrast?

Hi Brock,

The first thing I added was a Curves adjustment layer to reduce detail and lighten the shadows almost to nonexistence. This is placed above the background layer so it only affects the photo itself.

What's happening with dust is that you retain really high contrast edges, but lose detail in shadows. And because of the diffraction or scattering off the dust particles, shadows tend to get fairly light in strong sunlight and take on the color of the dust, just less saturated. To simulate this, you need to lose shadows almost entirely without losing high contrast edges.

The curves layer is adjusted so that the shadow edge is brought 3/4 of the way to the top (this is just a starting point), and the middle is brought down just a tiny bit. What you end up with is a very slight curve near the top of the 'grid' in the adjustment layer. The far left (shadow) of the curve should be the lowest point, but you can tweak the middle to get a smooth transition and hide details.

You'll end up with a *very* light background image with just a hint of color left, and the darkest shadows at about 80% gray at most.

[lokki]

Originally Posted by sfreund

but for the rest of the webinar Scott and Doug just kept referring to "the steps I showed you in the beginning."

Could anyone, or Doug, please tell me briefly, but exactly, what those steps were, their proper sequence (if any), their blending modes, what gets blurred, and what's the difference b/w the white and the gray fill layers? Also, what he was doing with the H/S layers?

I'm not sure I can write it out here in a reasonable number of words

However, I will talk to Doug about making the PSD file available.

The summary of the process is to make a blurred copy of the original image, desaturate it, and optionally add a little noise. That becomes an intermediate layer with about 70% opacity and gets a mask to approximate the distance from foreground to background. In the demo, I used Lens Blur to gradually change the blur with distance, also.

Above that is a Hue/Saturation layer to take out a little of the original layer's saturation.

Going up from there really starts to depend on the image. I chose one with few middle ground elements that would need to be masked, and was able to use a 'reflected' bar gradient from white to light gray - it's white in the middle and gray on the top and bottom. When set to Soft Light and low opacity, this acts to add brightness to the light areas, preferentially brightening the horizon which is the furthest point from the camera (we fudged the sky a bit for simplicity).

I think the rest of the image is explained in what you saw, but the short version is that I'm just adding refinement by looking at the intermediate result and comparing it with reference images to build the illusion.

The important elements for a fog atmosphere are loss of contrast and detail, low saturation, a little noise to account for variations in the density, and a careful balance of softening edges without total blur. Fog obscures detail and sucks out color (usually), but does not actually blur as much as it diffuses and softens - which gives things a slight glow or halo.

If I can post the PSD on RTP, I'll report back with a link.

[sfreund]

Thanks so much, and I'm so sorry but what I was asking about was actually the ray (otherworldly effect), not the fog effect. I should have been more specific. It's those first setup steps that I missed at the very beginning of the webinar.

Again, many thanks!

[lokki]

Originally Posted by sfreund

Thanks so much, and I'm so sorry but what I was asking about was actually the ray (otherworldly effect), not the fog effect. I should have been more specific.

Gotcha!

Ok, the ray is pretty straightforward... On a new layer, I used the Polygonal Lasso tool to get the rough shape of the beam, and filled with white. Apply a Gaussian blur, using a pixel value of rough half the width of your beam in the middle or wider. Then change the blend mode to Screen and reduce opacity.

You can also do the same thing with an Overlay blend mode if you want more subtle control. I like to fill a layer with a linear Noise gradient (so you get a lot of fine lines) and use Hue/Saturation to suck out all of the color. Then you can use a perspective transform to 'pinch' the ends of the rays together so they fan out. Rotate to the right position, add a small blur, and set to Overlay. (alternatively, blur before the transform step to get a non-uniform blur down the length of the rays).

Using Overlay lets the gray values act as dodge and burn masks, so you get brighter and darker bits. This one is especially useful for simulating multiple points of light through clouds or leaves of a tree.

For an interesting variation, use a Hue/Sat adjustment layer and leave a little color, sampled from the image itself. You can also use Blend If on the gradient layer to remove the darker colors and only have lighter... um... light.

Does that help?

-Scott

[sfreund]

Yes, very helpful, thanks so much for the quick response.

[lokki]

I'll send the PSD tonight for Doug to post. That should give you a few more ideas to play with, too.

[Doug Nelson]

This show is now available for international rentals.