Create a high-speed shot in Photoshop

Capturing falling objects by high-speed photography can make for impressive images. However the techniques can yield hit and miss results, with sharp focus and good composition difficult to achieve. Fortunately, there’s always Photoshop…

Our after image

Once you have your simple cake and tablecloth image, and an image of the object you want falling through the air, you’re ready to begin editing.

Cupcake before

Cherry before

Using Photoshop’s layers and masks, we can overlay the two and give the impression of a high-speed shot without all the difficulty of trying to achieve it in-camera.

How to create a high-speed photograph in Photoshop

01 Select Tilt Shift

Duplicate the Background Layer via Cmd/Ctrl+J and go to Filter>Blur>Tilt-Shift. Move the preview dot over the near edge of the paper case and adjust the blur preview lines. You then need to set the Blur to 35.

02 Overlay the cherry

Copy and paste the your falling image to your background image – in our case we’ve copied our cherry image onto the cake image. Use the Quick Selection Brush tool to select the background. Invert the selection and add a Layer Mask. Here we have selected a Black brush with the Hardness set to 80%.

03 Stalk cleaning

Use the Brush tool to remove any of the remaining toothpick in the original image, and carefully remove any white from the stalk. Click on the image icon in the layer then use the Clone tool to repair the bottom of the cherry.

04 Add cherry’s shadow

Hold down Cmd/Ctrl and click the cherry’s mask and invert selection. Deselect, then create a new blank layer under the cherry layer and fill it with black. Apply a Gaussian Blur of 25 pixels and move into position.

05 Tonal adjustments

Add a Layer Mask. Switch the Blend Mode to Overlay. Remove the effect of the shadow from the background and reduce the Opacity to 30% (depending on the exposure of your images, you might want to experiment with different opacities). Add a new Curves Adjustment Layer with an S-curve to improve the tone.

06 Digital ironing

Select the Clone Brush tool and then zoom into the image to 100%. Start to work across the image holding down Alt and clicking to capture a sample point and left-click to clone out creases in the tablecloth.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 1st, 2013 at 2:00 pm and is filed under Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a comment. Pinging is currently not allowed.