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[Light Painting for everyone] [male speaker] So my young nephews wanted to do something quite different for their mother for Mother's Day this year when creating a card. They've been quite interested in the light painting images they were seeing on the Internet, and here you can see some examples of them playing around with sparklers on a dark night with the camera set to a long exposure time. If we just have a look over at the Properties pane on the right-hand side of the Organizer workspace, you'll see that the camera was actually set to an 8-second exposure so there's plenty of time for them to wiggle the torch or the sparkler around and to have the light path recorded on the camera. Anything still at the time will be recorded sharp. Anything with movement will be recorded as a blur. You can see part of the boys are actually blurred there, and the light trail itself is recorded fairly sharp because it's comparatively quite bright. Notice that the ISO is set to 400 ISO and the aperture or F-Stop is 5.6. If you're not sure where to see these kinds of details for your images, then just look at the Properties pane. It's actually underneath the Window menu. You can turn it on there and then go through to the second item that you can see there for information to see these details for your individual images that you've taken with your camera. So here we've got our first muck around shot, and then we went on to doing some examples of drawing around them, trying to create some love hearts--not quite working-- and then writing their own names, which of course comes out backwards because they are writing it from their perspective rather than from our perspective or the camera's perspective. You've got to make sure that your camera is locked down on a tripod for these exposures because of the length of the time that the camera is held open. But what we then tried to do was get the boys to actually write some words but write them backwards. Here you can see Isaac writing a W and then in the next shot writing an E and then a love heart--Sam is making a love heart--and then a U. So we've got 4 different images all taken with the same location but the boys step slightly apart, writing We Love U for their mother. Next we can bring those together inside Photoshop Elements to create a single image like this and add in some text. And there we have it, a great card for Mother's Day. But you have to keep it secret because she doesn't know about it yet. Let's look at how we can do this inside Elements. I'm assuming that you've already taken the photos. You can use a torch or sparklers, as we did in this case. Then I'm going to go through and just grab the letter images. Here we have all 4 of them. And I'm going to right click and then go to Edit with Photoshop Elements. So all of those images will come in. Here you can see they are JPGs. Originally they were RAW files. It's up to you and your camera which you shoot. Shooting RAW files provides you with a bit more control when it comes to boosting up the shadows and maybe controlling the noise and the sharpness of the image when you're using such long exposure times. So now we have all the images open in the workspace. You can see in the Project Bin that we've got all the photos here. A manual way of working with these would be to actually drag each of these photos onto the same open document inside the Editor workspace and then try some aligning techniques in order to get them all aligned the same before using some masks to actually blend them together. But that's a more difficult way of doing things. We actually have an easier solution inside the Photoshop Elements Editor space. We just go up to File and then down to New and across to Group Shot. What will happen is Elements will drag all of those images into the Photomerge Group Shot workspace and will do the aligning for you. This is terrific. It takes out all the pain of doing manual aligning of multiple layers. And then we are also provided with a workspace where we can pick and choose which parts of the photos we wish to include in a final combined or montaged result. So here we are inside the workspace, and I'm just going to click and drag this image up to here, the final image, just to sit it as our background photo. Then I wish to include this particular letter against that background, and it's as simple as going and selecting the Pencil tool and just scribbling over the parts of the photo that I wish to include. You don't have to be too precise with this. We're just missing his legs there, so I'll just put an extra scribble down to his legs just to include those as well. And that's looking great. Let's go across to the next letter, and I'm going to include that as well, and I'm just going to scribble over the bits that I want to include and then let go, and you'll see that automatically we have that come through. You can do some adjusting. It's a bit harsh just around this edge here, so I'm just going to tap in a little bit more information and just try and get it to show up, maybe grab the Eraser tool and just scribble back some of the parts that you can see there, trying to get a reasonable look. Not quite right, so I'll just come down a bit more. Not too bad. We might need to do a little bit of adjusting there when it comes to working with the final result. Then we'll click on to the heart, use the Pencil tool again, just drag around the heart. You'll see a different color here because we're using a different color for each of the source photos that you can see at the base so you get a bit of an idea of which parts of the image are being sourced for the final photo. You'll notice in that last step that I've lost my U that was sitting over on the right-hand side. We can just select that particular source photo and use that as a final source in order to add it in as well. So now that we've got that working the way it is, I'm just going to go on to Advanced Options and just click on the Pixel Blending to try and get all of those areas just to blend carefully together so we get a nice, smooth background. And it's working pretty well. We've got a little bit of an area here that we might retouch, but the rest of it is looking great. So let's just click Done, and we'll create that photo. And there we have it, the final results. Just look at the area where these two photos meet down here just to make sure that it's okay. And I think we're all right. The blending has actually worked better in the final result than what we were seeing in the preview, so that's great. So there we've got the guys using the light painting technique to highlight their love for their mother. Let's just put in some text now in order to finish the card off. So I'm just going to go and select the Text tool, click on to the image, make it slightly larger so we can see what we're doing. I'm going to use a gray color here, and I'll show you why in a minute. So it's around about a mid gray, and I'll just type in Happy Mother's-- and I'm going to use Mother's Day on the next line, so I'm just going to hold down Control or Command and hit Enter just to enter or commit that text. Just go and grab my Move tool and drag out the text until it's just sitting as big as we want it on the background. So that's looking pretty cool. I'm going to click the green tick, which commits that, and I'm going to go over to the blend mode for that text layer and just drop down to Color Dodge. And you'll see that we have a lighter color come up. And we still have the texture of the building coming through from behind, so it looks like it's painted on, or it looks like it's stuck on to the background, so that's really cool. I'm going to hold down the Alt key now and just drag out a copy of that text layer so that means I can then come back with the Text tool and double click on it and then just go through and type in Mother's Day 2011, hit the green tick for committing, and then go back to my Move tool and drag out the size of this so it's a little bit bigger and matches the space that we have plus the prominence of the occasion. So let's get that to match just on the edges, the edge boundaries, so it's the same basic width and line it up. You can even use your arrow keys to get more precise in terms of lining it up and then finally just click the green Commit button. And we'll click off the text layer so we hide the boundaries. And there you have it, folks. We've got a new Mother's Day card for the boys to give to their mother this year using some light painting and some tricky text techniques as well.
