How To Do Magic Photography Tricks

This week I've taken a look at some magical photography tricks. ​

Please note: If you would like to try all of the photos featured below you will need to source the following props - Deck of Cards, Thread, Coins, Tape or BluTack. 

The Magic Card Throw
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​As this week is magic themed I think we should start with a deck of cards. 
In this tutorial we will make it look like I am throwing playing cards at the camera and they are frozen at the front of frame.

To start, take a single card, attach it to something in the foreground of the shot and make it look like it's floating. I used my lighting pole and some Blutack.
Then I took a step back and threw the remaining cards from the deck at the camera as it was taking the shot.
The trick to this is to get the thrown cards to have a little bit of motion blur in them so that they appear to be moving through the image whilst the card in the foreground remains in focus. 
For tips on achieving the perfect shutter speed I refer you to my previous video "Master The Basics For Great Photography"

The Floating Card

​Now you've shown off your throwing skills it's time to make a card float in the air.

For this you will need some thread or string.

​The start of this one is very simple.
Hang the card from the ceiling and have it floating in the foreground of the image.
Place your hand under the card and take the shot.

There you have your shot but obviously we have a problem, there is a string in the image. 
To deal with this we will need to take the photo into Photoshop and do some editing.

You'll notice I've made sure to make the photos I have been taking quite dark. This is for style reasons but also this is going to make our editing a lot easier.
There are two ways we can edit out the string:

Simple Paint brush method
Using the photoshop colour picker we are going to select the background colour from our image, then using the paint brush tool we will paint over the string making it disappear.

Advanced Clone Stamp Method
The clone stamp will copy pixels from another part of your image based on where you make your initial selection. What we plan to do is copy the pixels directly next to the string and copy them over the top of the sting making it disappear.
Select the clone stamp tool.
Alt-Click or Option Click on the dark area directly next to the string. Choose an area at the very bottom of the string. 
Now click on the string from the bottom and paint it out of the photo all the way to the top.

Floating Card - Advanced

Combining the Floating Card setup and the trick we used in the Card Throw photo we can do something even more interesting. 
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Using your deck of cards, throw them just before the photo is taken to achieve the combined effects. This produces a much more exciting final image.
Once you've take the shot just edit out the string using the same process described above.

Floating Coins
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For my final trick today I'm going to make some coins float. You could do this with just about anything but I have gone with the coins because they are light and easy to hang from the ceiling.
This can take a lot longer to setup but you can see from the final result below that it's worth it.

First, setup where you intend to stand and mark out the edges of the frame. This will give you some indication of where the coins will need to hang. You'll want to make sure there are coins on the left and right of the space you will be standing.
From the ceiling and inside your marked off area, begin hanging coins using sting.
Once you're happy you have enough coins stand in the center of the image again and hold your hands out like you are using your telekinetic powers to make the coins float in the air. Being able to pull a scary Magneto face really helps here.
Once taken you can use the Clone Stamp string removal method from before or alternatively, because we have a much lighter background this time,  we can use the healing brush tool instead.

Once we have all the strings removed we have our final result.

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