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If you ask me which photo is best to kickstart the year of 2016, I will say definitely a photo with beautiful Firework. Recently I have taken a Twin Tower with a beautiful reflection and me written in my previous post. Since then, a picture of reflection + firework has come into my mind. However, there is some difficulty if I plan to capture such scenery during the new year eve firework countdown. Firstly, there will be a lot of people here at that day to enjoy the firework and I would say it will be impossible to remove all of them by cloning or blending method. Secondly, this is actually a car park area, not only just people, I am expecting there will be cars too parked here. Hence, I decide to make a workaround and doing a superimpose of firework shoot.
I will have to revisit the place again and reshoot, in my previous shoots, I have photos with the cloud in the sky, however, my idea is to have a clear sky blended in with fireworks. I took my gears together with few bottle of water and splash them on the floor to create puddles. Waited the sky become darker and the moment the sky having lesser cloud, I took a 5 bracketing exposure shoots at ISO-400, as I am laying my camera on the floor to make the shoots, I tend not to create too long exposure shoots to avoid any possible chances in accidentally moving the camera
Shooting Info:
16 mm focal length,
5 Bracketing Photos at ISO-400. f11 aperture from 0.4 seconds to 6 seconds shutters speed.
Out of 5 exposures I pick 0 as base exposure to start with and a -2 exposure to recover highlight. Then I adjust the color balance toward slightly blue, after that I bring in Nik Software using the pro contrast, polarization, tonal contrast and the darken/lighten center filter to darken the sky and bringing more contrast on the photo. Beside that, I also using luminosity masking to further enhance the contrast on some of the specific area. And I added another color balance for slightly warm tone only on the center of the image to make it more pop. Lastly, I sharpen the overall photo.
P.s. I also making a fake reflection on top of the original reflection, as it look much cleaner in this way.
Now I have done all the necessary adjustment for the photo, it is time to blending in the firework now. The firework photos that I used are free download offer by Ice Flow Studios.com. You can get it from here too. 🙂
To adding firework, it is quite simple actually, what you need to do is open both your picture and firework photos in photoshop as below:
I have added several firework in this photo and I going to add another one more here.
The firework photo that will be use
Once having both photos open, just click and drag the firework photo and move it into the same file.
Just click Yes if you see this message
Now having both photos in the same file, select the firework layer and choose the blend mode into Lighten.
The firework will automatically blend in nicely, you can press Ctrl + T button to move and change the size of the firework. Once done, hit Enter to apply the change.
Moving and resize the firework
In certain case, you might get some unwanted red spot or smoke when sometimes the lighten mode do not blend in 100% perfectly. If that happen, you can just adding a layer mask, use the brush tool and remember change the brush color to black and brush out the red spot or smoke.
There are few red spots on the top of firework
Done! that’s all it need to add firework. I also flip the firework to adding one in the reflection too. 🙂
Here is the before & after comparison:
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