Assignment 2 - Photo manipulation

Hello again!

Today I'm going to discuss photo manipulation using Adobe Photoshop. I briefly talked about photo manipulation in my last post but this time I'll be doing my own photoshopping.

I'm not too experienced with photoshopping programs, I've only ever really taught myself to play around with colours until I think it looks better. Even if I did know really tricky stuff in Photoshop, I don't think I would ever do anything serious like in this controversial commercial for the company Dove.

The following photos I've touched up in Adobe Photoshop CS version 8.0.

This is a photo I took of Tim Delaughter of a band called the Polyphonic Spree. I took this photo in July 2007 at the Phoenix Concert Theatre in Toronto.

I find when I'm doing concert photography, red lights are my worst enemy. To be honest, there's not much I can do with this so in this situation I try to do my best in bringing out some of the details by adjusting colours and tones then making in black and white. Also it's best to brighten up the image before hitting the Grayscale button. In retrospect it looks kind of cool still but red isn't really what this band it about.

1) First I adjusted colour levels. I took out as much red as possible. Some of the details came out when I turned down the red.

2) Then I adjusted the saturation to try to take out even more red. This is tricky because you can change the whole look of the image really easily by adding or taking away too much colour! So I could, in theory, make this picture practically black and white by adjusting the red saturation levels to zero!

3) The second last step is to adjust Brightness and Contrast.
Sometimes adding more contrast can give it a dramatic and sometimes "old" look but it can also really darken your image.
If you have a dark image and try to make it bright, you might end up making your image look overexposed.
If you're finding you're constantly wanting to brighten up your images, you should maybe consider that you're doing it wrong. I rarely use these tools, and they didn't seem to do too too much for this photo anyway. Sometimes adjusting your colours will brighten up your image or sometimes even better, brighten up only certain parts of the image.

4) Grayscale; stripping all colour to make it black and white.

This photo is of Ted Leo in July 2008 during a free concert and Yonge and Dundas Square. Side note, one of the best concerts but it started pouring so they had to stop early!

1) The first thing I know I want to do it make him look less red/orange. You can tell on his shirt that there's a light shining on him making him look like that.
I'm again trying to adjust the colour balance. It's important to keep in mind which photos you want to keep colour. You need to make sure it looks like real life and not obscure colours where they don't belong due to bad photoshopping... Unless of course that's the look you want.

2) I'm finding that removing red is making is look brighter too, which is great because I want to use the Brightness tool as little as possible.

3) Then I'm adjusting the Hue/Saturation. Again, this tool makes it possible to get rid of whatever colour you want all together. That's not exactly what I'm trying to do though; I am however trying to give his face a more normal fair skin colour.
In this instance I'm of course trying to get rid of the red. I'm finding that the more red I take out, the more yellow remains and he's beginning to look like he has jaundice.


So now he doesn't look like a tomato. I've also managed to brighten up the background a bit by changing the way the colour blue or cyan look.

I can't do anything fancy but I think I've taught myself all I need to really know.