- Have no other option but to shoot through glass?
First off, it's always best to shoot with your lens
as close to the glass as possible
as to not see any reflections.
Some people even use a hood over it to block out
any of the reflections coming in.
But when you do have them in your final shot,
it can be very tricky to remove, but not impossible.
Let's take a look.
So now we're going to address those pesky reflections
that we talked about earlier in this time-lapse shot.
As you can see right here in the corner, we're shooting
through the glass which is obviously going to create
some reflections from behind us.
Now I did a really good job, while I was shooting,
to block out any reflections.
I used a black shirt that I had extra and placed it
over the camera, so basically, there was no space between
the camera and the glass.
But nonetheless, there was some light that got through
that was right here in this corner,
and it's very distracting.
So if you actually watch it, you can really notice
there's a lot of activity going on right here,
and you can't help but just keep on staring at it
and it basically just ruins the shot, in my opinion.
So let's go ahead and try to address that.
There's a number of different ways we can do that.
The one I like the most, for me,
is just simple compositing with a static layer
just like we did a number of other times.
So let's go ahead and double-click on this top layer
that we just made before, and notice how we have
our Alpha here on the top with a stencil,
Alpha blending mode, which basically knocks out
the sky on that layer.
So this is the real layer that's being affected.
So what we really want to take a look at is what's moving
and what's not.
So what we're going to do is we want to basically
put a static shot of this
over areas that's not moving in the shot.
So areas that are moving are areas like traffic
or sky, and since there's no sky in this shot,
the only real areas that are moving that we need to keep
moving are the traffic.
So let's go ahead and take this layer and duplicate it,
Command + D.
So now that we have this layer duplicated, we're going to
go ahead and freeze-frame it, essentially the same thing
as bringing in a static shot.
We're going to go ahead and right-click on the layer itself,
and go to Time, Freeze Frame.
And that's basically going to take this point
in this time-lapse sequence, this timeline,
and freeze-frame it to make the entire sequence
this static frame.
So now if you turn off both of them, you'll notice
that nothing moves at all.
So now we have a nice area in which to remove
some of those reflections.
So now what we're going to do is go into here itself
and try to remove these reflections by replacing over
the static shot with what's moving.
So let's go ahead and just create a mask layer
by starting with this pen tool.
We're going to basically cut out the street,
everything but the street, 'cause the street is moving.
Okay, that's one.
Let's cut out this building.
Okay, so now as you can see, this layer right here
is the static, freeze-frame layer.
So we shouldn't see any of that moving back and forth.
And underneath it is the actual time-lapse layer.
And now as you can see the mask does not include
this street, so we're still going to see cars
rushing by here and here.
Now, there are really no cars moving by here,
so we're pretty safe to go ahead and just leave
that in and take that away.
So now let's go ahead and play that back, and see if
we can notice the reflections anymore.
As you can see now it's only paying at half speed,
but nonetheless, I don't see anything moving in the corner.
I do see some of those reflections a little bit,
but the fact that they're not moving, I can't really tell
that they're even there.
So that's a very quick fix to take away moving reflections
that are constantly changing.
Now let's go back into the main comp.
There we go.
Now this is with all of our other effects.
Let's take a look here and RAM preview this.
Okay, now that it's all done, let's take a look
and just as I thought there is no more reflections.
Nothing's moving, although again, you do see the reflection
in this corner over here, nothing's moving.
Now, something else that you'll notice that since the sun's
actually going down, the color will be changing
on this layer right here, the lightness, everything.
See how it's getting darker and darker,
whereas this will not.
So now all that takes is a little bit more tweaking.
Maybe you do another layer over here and you duplicate it,
and you put the freeze-frame position somewhere down here
as opposed to up here.
Then you basically just use a transparency,
and you blend them together.
Very simple.
So there you have it.
A very, very, very simple way to eliminate reflections
from your time-lapse shot.