How To Create Flying Food Photos

Hey everyone, how's it going? In today's Thursday tip of the week, we're going to be doing a little trick. Photography. What's up? It's done. What's done? The image. Really? Yeah, I already did it. It looks great. Well, I guess that's it for this video and please subscribe and I'll see you in the next one. He's just kidding. So today I wanted to show you how to get some really fun food photos. I'm sure you've all seen the image where the food seems to be magically frozen in time. Whether it's hovering or floating over a table, a plate, your hand, a pan, whatever, it doesn't matter but the point is it's really not that difficult to do. I'm going to show you how to make an image like this where it kind of looks like I tripped and the sandwich went flying and I just so happened to freeze the action at the perfect time, mid-spill. Okay, okay, okay, I know this image looks really intimidating. It looks very technical and very magical but like I said, it's really not that difficult of an image to create. All you really need is something to rest your food on. Now I'm going to be using these two light stands and a roll of this 24-gauge steel wire. You can use anything, fishing line, whatever, it doesn't matter because later on you're going to be removing this in post-production. You're just going to want something to build your layers with. Another really important thing, least I forget, is a sturdy tripod. You're not going to want your camera to move throughout this entire process. Personally I love to add that tiny bit of environment. You know, I see a lot of these images on black and white and, you know, that's cool but for me I really love the images that have a bit more realism and they just look a little less staged. So I'll start off by building the scene with some props and then I'll place the action right here in the middle of the frame. All right, now that I got the sandwich scene built, I'm hoping it's going to give me that realism that I was going for but now that it's all ready to go, I can start placing my wires and building this sandwich up. I'll start with the bread first, that will give me a gauge to know where the top of my frame is and how much room I have for the rest of these ingredients. I really want to make sure that I space out these wires enough, that way we can clearly see each one of these cool layers. All right, now that I have this sandwich all stacked up, it's time to make that final image. You ready? Three, two, one, freeze frame. Then I want to deconstruct the entire sandwich, wires and stands, making one more image of just the background and the props. This image is going to be really useful later on. All right, let's jump into Photoshop, do some pretty easy post-production and remove those wires and make this image look real. Okay, first I'll load up both of the background image and the sandwich image into Photoshop ACR. I also took another image of just me, the background without the wires and me with the plate in my hand. I think this is going to help remove the wires from the right-hand side of the image, that way I don't have to mess around with all the little wrinkles in my shirt and stuff when I'm trying to remove those wires. All right, I'll select all three and do some color correction. This will apply all of the corrections to all three of the images at the same time. Now I'll play with these sliders a bit, add some more contrast and some lens correction. Then I'll open them all up into Photoshop and lay them one on top of the other. I'll hold shift and drag this image over and drop it down here. I'll create a layer mask and remove all of the wires from the background here on the right-hand side and all of the wires on the right-hand side as well with my shirt. Then I'll zoom in on the sandwich and use the patch tool and the clone stamp tool to really get into the finer details of the ingredients. The patch tool is the one with the little patch symbol. It's a really great tool for this. I'll work by drawing the lasso around the wire and then dragging the selection to an area that's similar. You don't really want to go wild with this tool and try to do too much at once. See, if I try to do this all at once, it goes crazy. Just small bits at a time. Now I don't want to make you sit through all of this, but this is pretty much how it goes. You use a simple layer mask to remove the bigger stuff and then use the patch tool and the clone stamp tool to remove the finer details and the wires from the ingredients. After a while, you get a rocking image like this. It looks pretty killer. I mean, it looks like I have some super telekinetic levitation powers or something. Or like I tripped and captured the spill mid-flight. Either way, it's a cool little trick to have in your bag. And hey, if you'd like to learn more about compositing, check out some of my courses on wetogether.com. I'll place the link in the description. And if you like this video, give it a subscribe, a thumbs up, leave a comment. And hey, if you make an image like this, tag me in it. I'd love to check it out. But that's it for me, and I'll see you in the next one.