Some tools are too powerful to not have in your tool bag as a photographer, and the plate-compositing technique is one such method.
Used frequently in the commercial and recreational photography industries, modern plate fusion is incredibly versatile and surprisingly simple. The results one can achieve using this technique produce an effect that seems a bit like cheating once you realize that using the power of modern editing software and the ability to use how easy it is to use their layer masks.
Often used in the entertainment industry for group shots of performers who can’t always be in the same place due to their busy schedules, the core concept of this technique is locking your camera in one place. position, the optimal is a sturdy tripod. and take multiple images, which are then merged using layer masks in software like Photoshop. Photographers will take a clean background photo and use it as a clean background to hide in photos of subjects, taken in the same framed scene. Using a tripod to perform this technique optimally keeps each layer tightly aligned, makes the process of masking and merging them simple, and results in a very polished final hybrid photo. about your scene.
Imagine this: you have four actors for a sitcom and the studio needs a group photo of them. Instead of playing the fucking game of arranging their schedules and editing them all at once, a photographer would set up the scene and lock the camera on a tripod, then bring in each actor as they became available. . The photographer can then carefully light each individual, even leaving the equipment in the frame of the subject when needed, such as a light stand, because the original shot of the background clean gives you the ability to not only mask your objects together, but also mask anything extra in the theme panes. After all the actors have finished shooting the scene, a simple session at the editing desk will stitch them together into one image by stacking layers, applying layer masks, and carefully masking the actors with each other, as well as masking any lighting fixtures included in the frame.
This concept can be applied to many other forms of photography for creative and practical purposes. Large highly polished family photos can be done following the aforementioned process, but thinking outside of how this can be a good tool in your photographer’s toolkit will open up. a lot of creative possibilities.
I first discovered this technique when teaching myself to use off-camera flash. I used myself as a subject during my flash training using a tripod and a 10 second timer, moving in and out of the scene as I made adjustments to get suitable photo. I’ve been reading up on plate stitching and realized that I’ve done a large part of the workflow and it will be a relatively simple matter to practice my flash while also creating some portraits. artistic self-portrait using myself as the subject not only once in a scene, but many times – effectively “cloning” myself in the shots. In the end, I created a small series of images in which I was playing a game with myself, and the deceptively simple process of doing so resulted in a rather polished and enjoyable work for myself. I was inexperienced at the time and caught my attention from potential clients.
But there’s a lot more potential for this technique than self-portraits and group shots. By adding a few extra components to the workflow, I discovered I could use it to create something along the lines of a time-lapse still image, showing movement in a scene in motion by masking objects within its motion to show them in multiple places along their path of motion.
The use of this technique came in handy for a shot of professional freestyle cyclist Sean Nielson performing for a local town’s 4th of July celebration. As Nielson was performing his signature motocross jump, I put myself in position for a shot that showed both the take-off and landing ramps, as well as the full arc of his jump. I crouched, focused first, held as still as possible, and used the camera’s burst mode to take a series of shots as Nielson darted off the ramp and slid back, only to touch down on the ramp successful slope. I suspect that if I’m careful, I can still do this technique without a tripod, thanks to Photoshop’s incredibly handy Auto-Align Layers feature. My theory is correct, and the auto-align goes without a hitch, producing the same stack of aligned frames for compositing that the tripod would do. I was able to select Nielson’s best frames while jumping between and masking each frame into the scene as well as cleaning up and masking some unsightly impurities in the photo. When all was said and done, I created a static time shot that perfectly showed his path as the audience gathered around to watch. The image won first place in the Utah Press Association’s Better Press Competition in the sports photography category, although it is important to note that the process of taking the photo must be explained in the caption of the photo. you if an image like this is used in a press application to avoid misleading viewers into believing that it was taken in a single frame.
The applications for this workflow are nearly endless. One must simply apply the concepts in order to use them correctly. Some photographers use this technique to ensure a clean image by just removing the subject or item, rather than adding them. For example, some street and city photographers will use this technique to sharpen or depict scenes of people and vehicles. The core strength of this approach is simply the accessibility to easy, polished compositing, without the need to cut and paste subjects into an unoriginal scene. Through this method you even get the benefit of perfect shadow orientation in your mix, because each frame exists in reality and is merged with another, preserving quality. light and shadow, resulting in a perfect mixture of reality that does not strike the human eye or the subconscious brain as “strange”, a serious problem that causes many hand-combined images in which the subject may have been originally shot in a scene where the light and shadow direction is different from yours.
