Photographic Fireworks

Quick reference

• 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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