How to Take Floating Photos – Levitation Photography

The post How to Take Floating Photos – Levitation Photography appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Caz Nowaczyk.

In this great video from, Dunna Did It, you will learn how to create Levitation photography. That’s right, you’ll learn how to take floating photos!

What you need:

Camera to shoot with
Tripod
Photo Editing software

How to create levitation photography:

Set up your object that you are photographing.
Put your camera’s settings to the required settings based on your lighting and room.
The trick is to take one photo holding it with your left hand, and then one holding it with your right hand.
Be sure to turn on you turn Grids ON in your camera.
Line up your camera in the same spot for each shot using your grid.
Use manual focus for each shot because you want the focus to be exactly the same for each photo.
Hold your camera with one hand and line it up to your grid, focus and take the photo.
While still holding it, reach with your other hand and grab the opposite side (keeping the camera in the same position). Let go with the other hand, and take the 2nd photo. Try this as many times as you need to.
Choose and edit your best photos in Lightroom (or the editing program of your choice).
Once you have the two you want to combine, jump to Photoshop (press cmd+E mac, ctrl+E win) and choose Edit in Photoshop.
Go to the image held with the left hand and double-click the layer in the Layer Palette to make it an editable layer.
Then choose Cmd+A to select all, then Cmd+C to copy.
Jump to the other image, double click the layer in the Layers Palette to make the layer editable.
Then choose Cmd+V to paste the other image you copied into the new image.
Lower the opacity of the top layer to about 36% so you can see how well you can line them up.
Move the top layer until it is lined up.
Next, we want to take the top layer and delete to parts we don’t want.
Put a layer mask onto the top layer and select your Brush Tool (use a soft brush by turning down the hardness).
Change your foreground color in your toolbar to black to paint out areas of the layer mask.
Paint out the areas you don’t want. To fine-tune, make your brush smaller and continue to paint out areas you don’t need.
Check all your lines around your image to ensure they line up.
Do any further edits you want and you are done!