Mini brief 5... The next big thing.

Lights Camera Action.

OKAY! Photoshop actions = definitely new favourite thing.
Yes, I had heard of them, yes I knew what they did. But I didn't know how to make one.
Correction, I didn't know how to record one.

I am in love love love with photoshop actions. Anyone who wants to know how to make one should click here

Our task was to photograph an object at different angles etc and then when we got to class we would create an action to edit all the images in the same way. Best. Idea. Ever. Hello absolute consistency!

I photographed some old blank CD's in the bathtub, with food colouring and flowers to create some abstract and pretty images!! Then we recorded an action to create consistency throughout all the images and then we put them together in a grid format.

Here's mine!

Now I am very much looking forward to doing my next shoot to create a great action to apply to some images! Yay! :)

Mini Brief Four. The realisation that photoshop is a digital darkroom.

Slowly my mind is filling up with more and more photoshop information. Which is amazing, the things I have learned are beyond anything I have ever dreamed of! Like I have explained in previous blog posts, I have always loved photography but I always thought that photoshop was kind of like cheating and that to be a good photographer you shouldn't have to use photoshop to make an image amazing. But then I realised that photoshop is essentially a digital darkroom.

In high school, I spent countless hours processing images in the darkroom. Developing, stopping, fixing, washing, cropping, adding effects, burning, dodging and I always thought it was magical. Now we can do those same things on photoshop and never have to worry about wasting chemicals because it didn't turn out right... that's why we have a history button.

Right now I feel like I am back in high school, doing some persuasive writing, but really I am just telling you about my eureka moment during mini brief four.

It really started when I added an adjustment layer and I remembered making an imaging and laying a OHP copy of a news paper article over the image so it looked like a layer of news paper was covering my face. Then I thought... oh onions have layers, oh wait, photoshop has layers!!!

Adjustment layers quickly become my next favourite thing on photoshop. The ability to change a particular layer only was so amazing and I had heaps of fun pushing my photos to their absolute maximums.

This is a before and after example of an image I manipulated in photoshop.

Personally, I think that the original is nicer but it was still heaps of fun to push the image to extremes and make it look completely different. The before version looks like a dry winters day and the after version looks like a lush winters twilight.

Oh photoshop yay for you being my new darkroom.... wait a minute that's obviously where Adobe got their name for the 'Lightroom' software....

Mini Brief Three

One thing I find really interesting about photoshop is that there are so many ways to do the same thing. For example, one of those things is selections. There are SO many way to select things!! Learning about these was actually very worthwhile, while it wasn't quite as fun as the other briefs had been so far, it still really great to learn.

We learned about the following tools.

and

The one I found the best to use was the colour range selection, this was particularly good when I was trying to isolate between background and kitchen utensils in this task. For example, I took a lot of my images on our orange bench top and many of our utensils are black and silver so they were easy to select due to the very diverse colours of the items.

For example: 

In this instance I could select the black spatular in the colour range by pressing the plus eye dropper button on the utensil to select it and the minus eye dropper button on the surrounding areas in order to make sure I didn't select any background. Here you can see how I was able to select the right area. 

There were many other ways which we learned to make selections such as the quick selection tool, the marquee tool, the pen tool and the magic wand tool. But it was colour range that proved to be a very successful and reliable selection tool for me.

Mini Brief Two.

I definitely think one of my most favourite things about photoshop is its ability to retouch photos and make people look flawless, I mean after all it's what we see constantly in magazines! If only we could look as perfect as they portray some to be all the time. But probably the most valuable thing that photoshop offers us, is the way you can retouch an image that you may consider nearly destroyed. It might be ripped, torn, have creases in, be discoloured or even have an area of the image ruined. You can almost alway fix it with photoshop.

Mini brief two gave us the opportunity to fix a photo that was 'damaged'. In my case, that was a little bit difficult, as having two photographers in the family means that we take care of our images. But I did manage to find one.. one of me, crinkled up at the bottom of the trunk they are stored in. It had pretty much been screwed up and had weight on it so the creases were reasonably significant. It was a black and white photo so I was able to clone areas to remove the creases, airbrush imperfection from these creases off my face and get rid of a big white scratch off the photo.

I also repaired the skin on one of my photos that I had taken for the florist shoot I have mentioned in previous blog posts. Here make up was done so well but when I took a close up shot, unfortunately my sharp and fast lens caught the imperfections and made her pores show, so I airbrushed her skin a little and dodged her eyes to make them even stronger than her skin.

We were also given the task of adding a person into a photograph and so I added myself into a photo of my friend and her mother as they wanted a photo with me that day but I was busy taking the photos! This was a bit difficult because I had to muck around with the selection of myself to make sure my lighting looked the same as what was on them. 

Air brushing and eye brightening.

Check out this photo I took while on a shoot for a great floral boutique in New Plymouth, Petal and Prickle.

The model was absolutely stunning but to have the opportunity and new skills to be able to edit the image some more, I decided to cease that opportunity and accentuate her beauty!!

You can see more of these images here :)

Mini Brief One.

A busy schedule means that I have been running a little bit behind on my blog posts, but luckily I have been keeping notes in class on bits of paper, (oh the organisation of an artist!)

Digital Media has provided me with some very good and exciting skills to put to use on photoshop and I feel that my editing is getting better and better each week. Mini brief one consisted of making a face out of multiple facial features. This was a particularly fun task and meant that I got to practice working with layers and experiment with using transparency blend modes.

We were given several facial features to work with such as sheeps ears, cows noses, hawk eyes, lizards frill neck and leopard faces but I also decided that I wanted to include some of my own images. At the beginning of February I photographed a friend for her university ID but as beautiful as she looked in them, she was not that happy with them and I ended up editing a photo from one night we went to a party, so she looked like a major babe in her ID photo!! Lucky gal! Anyway, I used her beautiful face as the basis for my image and worked with that to create a new face, with sheep ears, butterflies sitting on her head, flowers in her hair, a leopard print face, her own sparkling eyes, someone from the internets eyebrows and a dog nose.

Take a look!

She reminds me of a little fairy tale creature!!

I encountered a couple of problems while I was creating this image, such as finding eyebrows that suited her face. It was also tricky erasing the leopard print opaque skin layer so it fitted her face well. While I didn't learn any major new photoshop skills in this class, there were a few little things that I did learn! For example, - brighting eyes using the dodging skill, and learning about the different effects that transparency blend modes have on an image. See below how these affected the image...

All in all, I did have a lot of fun working with the layers and creating something out of the ordinary. 

Moments.

Photography definitely keeps me busy. My days consist of 98% photography and I couldn't be happier. I would like to introduce to you another blog that I run on tumblr. This blog is where every day for 365 days of 2013, I blog an image that I have taken. It is meant to be new photo every day but sometimes I get so busy working on photos from previous days that I don't get to go and out get anything new. However, about 90% of the time, it is a brand new image from that day.

You can check out my blog here and what follows is a screen shot of my latest work (13th March 2013)

It gets pretty interesting blogging a new image every day and I've gained quite a few followers on this blog. I also find that my photo editing and images etc seem to be getting better with time - must be all these courses I'm doing.

I try to capture moments from a day or things we might see during the day and completely miss or take for granted. Sometimes I capture moments that have been planned or posed for. It's all a great learning curve. I'm currently trying to decide which moment from today I'm about to upload to my blog.

I'm a little bit obsessed with depth of field, it's probably one of my favourite aspects of photography. Which one do you think I should upload?