Locked lesson.
About this lesson
Good for compositing tasks, and adding elements like reflections.
Exercise files
There are no related exercise files for this lesson, or we cannot provide them due to copyright issues.
Quick reference
Topic Adding Fireworks to a Photo
Integrate your best fireworks shot into another image.
When to use
Good for compositing tasks, and adding elements like reflections.
Instructions
Select and edit the best fireworks shot in Lightroom
- Within light room scroll to the bottom and ‘Enable Profile Corrections’
To apply to all the photos:
- Select all the photos, and activate ‘Sync Settings’.
- Press ‘Check None’, and then activate the ‘Lens Profile Corrections’.
- Press ‘Synchronize’.
- Increase the contrast, the highlights, and the clarity to improve the individual shots.
- For the photos that you will use latter, press the ‘P’ key (pick).
- Export.
Import into Photoshop.
- Open up the background image and drag in the fireworks shot that you want to add.
- Hold down the shift key and resize to taste. Position to taste.
Blend in the Image.
- Change the blend mode on the Fireworks photo to ‘Lighten’.
- Add a curves adjustment layer and clip it to the fireworks.
- Adjust curves to make it pop.
Add a Reflection to water in the Background image.
- Select fireworks image and with command or control press ‘J’ to duplicate.
- Select bottom version and go Edit/Transform/Flip Vertically.
- Position in water.
- Add Edit/Filter/Blur/Gaussian and set to 5.
- Add some motion blur with Edit/Filter/Blur/Motion Blur:
- Angle 90,
- Distance 65.
- Add a curves adjustment layer and clip it to the reflection fireworks.
- Decrease opacity to 66%.
- 00:04 All right, here I am in Lightroom with all of the firework photos that I
- 00:08 took on the 4th of July.
- 00:09 And if I go down here, I have 226 of them.
- 00:12 For the most part, I shot these firework photos with a four second exposure.
- 00:17 At F-13, at ISO-100, and you have to make sure if you're shooting things like this,
- 00:22 whether it's fireworks or lightning, that your camera's on a tripod.
- 00:26 There's no way you can get a four second exposure if your
- 00:29 camera's not steady on the ground.
- 00:32 Now that said, it did take a little bit of experimentation to
- 00:35 get the focus right because I figured I just set my camera to manual focus and
- 00:39 set it to infinite and I would get some nice sharp images.
- 00:42 But as you can tell, with these first ones, they're not that in focus.
- 00:46 And if I scroll through these using the right arrow key,
- 00:48 you can definitely tell that some of these are really out of focus.
- 00:51 Now, this one, I believe, is where I started to adjust the focus, and
- 00:54 I got some pretty decent images.
- 00:56 So in terms of the developing side of things,
- 00:58 there's actually not much you have to do.
- 01:00 I'm gonna to press D on my keyboard to enter the Develop module.
- 01:04 And the first thing I like doing, is scrolling down to the bottom and
- 01:07 turning on Enable Profile Corrections,
- 01:09 which corrects your image based on the lens that you were using.
- 01:12 And in this case, I was using a 17 to 40 millimeter lens.
- 01:15 Now you could go through and do this on every single photo, but
- 01:18 as you're probably gonna be correcting the profile on all of your photos,
- 01:21 there's a much quicker way of doing this.
- 01:23 Pressing G on your keyboard to enter the Grid view, and what you want to do,
- 01:26 you want to select all of your photos with Cmd or
- 01:28 Ctrl+A, and then you're gonna hop over to the right and choose Sync Settings.
- 01:32 Now here you probably only want to sync the profile corrections.
- 01:36 So go ahead and
- 01:37 click Check None and then only check Lens Profile Corrections and then Synchronize.
- 01:43 And when you do that, Lightroom's gonna go through all the photos in
- 01:46 this collection and apply the profile correction to all of the photos.
- 01:50 You don't have to go through and manually do it to every single one.
- 01:53 So now let me hop back into the Develop module and
- 01:55 we're gonna go through some of the basic settings that we're gonna do.
- 01:58 What I found to be helpful for firework photos is actually fairly simple.
- 02:01 You probably don't wanna mess with the exposure unless it's really too bright or
- 02:04 really too dark.
- 02:06 But increasing the contrast a little bit definitely helps, and
- 02:09 then increasing the clarity really helps make those fireworks pop.
- 02:12 Now you'd assume you could go ahead and increase the vibrance to make those
- 02:16 colors pop, but you're gonna notice when I do that, the blues get really ugly and
- 02:21 the reds get a little bit too saturated, it just doesn't look good.
- 02:24 So typically I'm gonna keep the vibrance at zero.
- 02:27 And then depending on the photo,
- 02:28 you may wanna increase the highlights and the shadows just a little bit.
- 02:32 You'll notice when I increase the shadows, some of the smoke comes into play.
- 02:36 If you do want that smoke visible, just increase the shadows just a little bit,
- 02:40 and that smoke will seep through nicely.
- 02:42 And finally the last thing that I do, is crop the photo,
- 02:45 just to focus right on in on the fireworks.
- 02:47 So I'm gonna press R on my keyboard to enter the Crop tool, and
- 02:50 simply crop off some of the areas that are a little bit distracting, just like that.
- 02:56 And press Return or Enter to accept the crop.
- 02:59 And there you go.
- 03:00 That firework image is complete.
- 03:02 Now in order for me to remember that this is an image that I wanna save and
- 03:05 use later on, I'm gonna press the P key on my keyboard to flag this as a pick.
- 03:11 You can either do this before or after your developing.
- 03:14 Sometimes if you're dealing with a lot of photos, it might be a good idea to
- 03:17 go through all the photos first, flag the ones you want to edit and
- 03:20 then use your filters to hide all the photos that didn't make the cut.
- 03:24 So if I go back to my Grid view, right at the top right I can turn filters on.
- 03:28 And I can filter it by flagged.
- 03:30 And when I do that, all the photos that I've flagged, are right here in front of
- 03:33 me and I don't and I don't see anything else that wasn't flagged,
- 03:36 which can definitely make the editing process a lot simpler.
- 03:40 So in terms of post processing,
- 03:41 there really isn't much that I did to these photos.
- 03:43 For the most part I increased the contrast a little bit, increased the clarity and
- 03:47 then, depending on the photo, the shadows and the highlights.
- 03:50 And of course I cropped the image to focus on the fireworks.
- 03:53 So now that the post processing has been dealt with, let's hop into Photoshop to
- 03:57 see how you can composite these images into your nighttime photography.
- 04:01 So here I have a few of my favorite firework images that I exported from
- 04:04 Lightroom, and bringing them into Photoshop is very simple.
- 04:08 Grab the one that you want and
- 04:09 drag it right over top of the image that is already opened up in Photoshop.
- 04:13 And Photoshop's gonna place it as a smart object and
- 04:16 give you the option to resize it.
- 04:18 So I'm gonna hold down my Shift key and just resize it down just a little bit.
- 04:22 And when I'm happy, press Return or Enter to place the image.
- 04:26 And now with my Move tool, I can move it in to place.
- 04:28 I'm gonna leave it right about there.
- 04:30 Now, obviously there's a little bit of a problem.
- 04:32 The background is completely black.
- 04:34 So how do we deal with this?
- 04:36 Well there are a few ways, including Blend If, Layer Masks and Blending modes.
- 04:40 We're going to be using Blending modes, which can be found in your Layers panel.
- 04:43 So with that layer selected, right over here were it says Normal,
- 04:47 those are your blending modes.
- 04:48 Now typically I would use Screen, but you might notice there is a little bit of
- 04:52 a border around the image, and the colors aren't as vibrant as they used to be.
- 04:57 So Paul Murphy over on Google+ suggested instead of using Screen,
- 05:02 we can use Lighten instead, which deals with the black background quite nicely and
- 05:07 leaves your fireworks nice and vibrant.
- 05:09 So thank you Paul for that tip.
- 05:11 These fireworks look a lot better.
- 05:13 And if you further wanted to tweak the way the fireworks look,
- 05:16 you can add adjustment layers.
- 05:18 I'm gonna go ahead and add a very simple Curves adjustment layer.
- 05:21 And we wanna make sure to clip it so
- 05:22 the curves adjustment layer only affects our fireworks.
- 05:25 I'm gonna press this icon right here and
- 05:27 then I can just make some minor adjustments to the curves of this layer.
- 05:30 Just like that.
- 05:31 Just to make the fireworks pop a little bit more.
- 05:34 And finally, the last thing you may wanna do, especially with an image like this,
- 05:38 is add a little bit of a reflection of the fireworks in the water.
- 05:40 So I'm gonna select the original fireworks layer right down here.
- 05:43 And with my Cmd or Ctrl key held down, I'm gonna press J on my keyboard.
- 05:47 That'll duplicate that layer for us.
- 05:49 So just so I don't mess up the link between the firework layer and
- 05:53 the curves adjustment layer, I'm gonna select the bottom most firework layer
- 05:56 which is the one we need to flip vertically.
- 05:59 So under the Edit > Transform menu,
- 06:01 you can select Flip > Vertical and then move the firework into place in the water.
- 06:05 Just like that.
- 06:07 And obviously, it's a little bit too sharp.
- 06:09 We need to blur it a little bit.
- 06:11 Now this later is already a smart object.
- 06:13 So under the Filter > Blur menu, I'm gonna start off with a Gaussian blur.
- 06:17 I'm going to set my blur somewhere around, five pixels, and press OK.
- 06:23 And taking a look at the other reflections in the water,
- 06:25 they look like they may have a little bit of a vertical motion blur to them.
- 06:29 So back into the Filter menu, down to Blur, I'm gonna choose Motion Blur.
- 06:33 And set a very small motion blur,
- 06:35 somewhere around 65 pixels, making sure the angle is set to 90, and then press OK.
- 06:40 Now with this point taking a look at the reflection it's not bad, but
- 06:43 I think the tones need to be adjusted just a little bit.
- 06:46 So just like we did with the original firework layer,
- 06:49 we can add an adjustment layer.
- 06:51 And I'm going to add another Curves adjustment layer.
- 06:53 And once again make sure to clip it to that layer, with this icon right here.
- 06:57 And then you can go ahead and make some adjustments to make sure that
- 07:00 the contrast is nice and sharp and the firework reflection looks great.
- 07:05 Just like that.
- 07:06 And then if you need to, you can always decrease the opacity of the reflection so
- 07:10 it's not as harsh, somewhere right around there.
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