Hello everyone, Stratos here from Lightpulse.
A few days ago I went out in the cold to capture some light trails in a cool location in my hometown. Although most of the shots ended up to the trash can I managed to get 3-4 keepers form that night, and today I am going to show you how I shot / converted / processed a photo from that session with this Photoshop tutorial.
So here we go.
Gear:
For this session I used my D7000 with tokina 11-60 and my trustred Slik tripod with a ballhead. Plus many warm clothes because the temperature was way too low.
How I shot:
Here’s a step by step on the procedure I followed during the session:
- I placed the camera on my tripod in a relative low position and used Live viev to frame my shots.
- In order for the camera not having to refocus every thing I hit the shutter button I just switched to manual focus and set the Tokina 11-60 focus to infinity using the focus scale on the lens itself.
- I switched to Manual mode and set my aperture to 13, my ISO to 125 and my shutter Speed to 20 seconds in order to have plenty of time to capture the light trails, while at the same killing most of the ambient light as much as possible.also by using such a large aperture and having focus to infinity I managed to have a great Depth Of Field so everything was tack sharp and in focus.
- Once I had the technical setting spot on I just waited for cars to pass by and hit the shutter button a few times. Trial and error is the way to go from here.
Post Production in Photoshop
I first opened the photo in Adobe Camera Raw and made the following adjustments:
- I darkened the Blacks
- I added a bit of clarity
- I also added a strong vingiette
Once I was done in ACR I opened the photo in Photoshop and did the following:
- I buplicated the photo layer and added a Bleach Bypass effect in Photoshop, then set the Layer opacity to 25%.
- I duplicated the Bleach Bypass Layer and set the mode to Screen and the opacity to 100% in order to brighten the lights a bit more.
- I then added a Black and White Adjustment Layer and converted the photo into Black and White. I used the Orange and Yellow sliders in order to bring down and dissappear the yellow / orange lights and other minor details I did not need in the frame.
- Finally I created an empty layer above all other layers and filled it with Black. Then I added a Layer Mask to the black layer using Layer -> Layer Mask -> Hide all.Once that was done I used the brush tools to mask in the Black layer in order to completely de some distracting elements that were in the photo.
That’s all.
I’d LOVE to show you a before and after photo but my SD card crashed resulting in loosing the photos from that session and all I am left with is this low res image. Since though I had already completed the tutorial post I though it might help even without the before and after example.
Thanks for dropping by today.
Kind regards
Stratos
The post Photoshop / Photography Tutorial: How I shot and converted a light trails photo to Black and white appeared first on Stratos Agianoglou.
