Week 9 - Dodge/Burn Tool & Filters

You will be fixing one photo this week with the dodge and burn tool and posting it to your blog. Let us know what you did and post the before and after shots. Also post two photos that you have applied filters to.

My first photo actually utilizes BOTH filters AND dodge/burn. The original was taken in the middle of the night with a street lamp and the best I could get color-wise was a murky yellow. I decided I wanted that adjusted and the detail strengthened. I used dodge and burn to highlight all the feathers in the wings and then used burn to strengthen the shadows of the cracks and deeper places. I still wasn't quite satisfied so I applied a cool filter to lessen the yellow and desaturated everything slightly.

Original:

Edit:

For my second photo I wanted to use the same color filters to very subtly increase the greens in the photo. After some slight retouching to her face, I selected the cloth and her eyes individually and layered an emerald green filter over them to strengthen the color without using saturate and also changing her skin tone. Some brightness adjustments and here we go!

Original:

Edit:

Week 8 - Adjusting Light and Color in Photoshop

This week our subject matter is photoshop color and light adjustments and Introduction to photomosaics. You will be fixing two photos this week and posting them to your blog. Let us know how you did this.

I went to an anime convention last weekend. The vast majority of people tend to go to these conventions in costume (cosplay) as a particular character they like from a book/movie/comic/anime/video game. It is customary for anyone who attends the conventions to bring along a camera and take photos of the good cosplays or the characters they have a particular affinity from. I edited two shots to basically remove all the NOISE from the background, strengthen the colors slightly, cropped and darkened what I wanted out of focus, and tweaked some colors to make things stand out more or less.

First picture (original):

Edit:

Second picture (original):Edit:

Week 7 - Basic Image Manipulation

Your assignment this week is to take two photos that you have taken and alter them using the crop, move and selection (marquee, lasso and magic wand) tools.

Once again this is coming through a bit late, I apologize. I was at a convention in Connecticut from Thurs-today and had no access to the internet.

For my editing, I decided to take a crack at using Christy Schuler's retouching tutorials and see what I could do with some of the photos I'd taken. I started with one you will probably recognize from the framing assignment:

And the retouched version:

I used the "Skin" tutorial from that website and cropped the image, made a few duplicate layers, blurred and highlighted the skin, darkened some shadows, enlarged and lightened her eye slightly, increased the contrast of everything, and touched up all the little blemishes I found. Not too major a difference, but little ones.

For my second photo, I was a bit inspired by CJ's post on researching HDR imagery for our class paper, so I decided to try my hand at combining three photos into something (sort of) along those lines.

The following photo was actually taken at the Sharon, VT rest stop en route home from the convention this weekend. Unfortunately I didn't bring a tripod with me, so I was attempting to take three varied-exposure photos while holding my camera steady on a railing. This would be why the photo is a bit blurry. Then I took three photos into Photoshop and overlaid them over one another. A few nudges and adjustments here and there and I got them lined up as best I could. I played around with the different blending techniques, tweaked the contrast of the flattened image slightly, and got this:

Week 6 - Landscapes

I'll start this off my apologizing for the lateness on my updating - my apartment has been without internet since the 1st and we are not going to have it again until the 5th or 6th, so my updating has been limited. Unfortunately all my editing software is on my home computer and my work computers are just no good for the preparation required to update my week's work.

Assignment #2: Your job this week is to take photos of landscapes. What is a landscape in photo?...Post your favorite landscape photos to your blog as well as a short description of what you learned about landscape, or what is was like "getting the perfect photo." The subject of the post should be landscape, how you choose to discuss it is up to you!

I am going to start this post by saying that my least favorite subjects for photography are landscapes and sunsets. Landscapes are far too restricting in a compositional sense, because they span such a wide distance. It ends up being more luck than anything in finding that amazing shot. Most landscapes just look like landscapes. Same as sunsets.

That being said, both of these were involved in this week's assignment.

Landscapes are hard for me, I have to ride that midline between showing a large segment of the natural world and keeping SOMETHING within close proximity that I can utilize compositionally. I spent most of this week just running around and shooting everything I saw. A great landscape is far more dependent on finding that amazing place that has a surreal beauty to it, rather than creating it.

I am not super pleased with my results, but they'll do.

This last one is not quite a part of the assignment, but it was a candid I took with my family and I really love how it looks: