Colour

Black and White photography can be quite dull and it also leaves a lot of aspects of the photograph a mystery and you have to read into them a lot more but they are also timeless and at some points they're the best looking option. Colour photographs are very set in stone and it tells a lot more of a story because you know what you're looking at. Colour in photographs adds a lot more contrast and gives it more of a story whereas in black and white you can loose some of the aspects of the photographs and they fade away with it all being the same colour.

These are taken by William Eggleston and I really like the these because they're bright and quite interesting, having colour in these photographs makes the more likable to me because they aren't almost boring like black and white.

































Task

Sharpening

To Sharpen an image on photoshop you need to duplicate your image. Once you have duplicated your picture on photoshop you need to double click on the second layer (the layer you're going to sharpen) and it will pull up the Layer Style window. Make sure the opacity is at 66% and that and that on the 'This Layer' is at 235 and 255 , to split the slider you need to press alt and click on it. After this Press OK.













Then click on filter at the top of your screen and go down to 'Sharpen' and the 'Unsharp Mask'.

This window will pop up and you need the exact settings showing , 320% , 0.6 Pixels and 4 Levels.

Clicking on 'Edit' and then 'Fade Unsharpen Mask' it will pull this next window.

Photoshop Joiners

This is a Hockney style joiner image that I had a go at making. What I had to do is open photoshop, clicking on 'file' and then ' load files to stack'. Then clicking browse and find the images I wanted to join and I made sure that 'attempt to automatically align source images' is ticked and then click OK. Photoshop will have then aligned the pictures to it thinks all the images will look together as one. I then went into  'edit', 'fill' and changed the background colour to black.

Lighting and Props

Soft box







When a soft box is placed around the light it creates almost a glow, it's used to light up the background in High Key Lighting. The soft box means the light produce is less harsh and doesn't white out someones face. They diffuse the light so it covers more space, the more soft boxes you use at once the more area you can cover, and the more evenly lit it looks.








Beauty Dish







A beauty dish can come in different sizes and is more of a direct light, because the dish is rounded it means the light creates less shadow because the light almost stretches around the side of the object / person in subject to the shot. Because the light is a lot harsher it can blur out a lot some imperfections if there are any.

Small Reflector + Honeycomb grid

The small reflector means it's almost a spotlight, directing the light on one point, it also creates a lot of shadow where the light isn't pointing. 

The Honeycomb grid means that the light shines through the grid to create  beam of light, the aim is to create a focused beam with as little diffusion as possible.

Manual Camera Settings

Today we went into the theatre to experiment with the manual settings on our cameras. With the lighting we found how to get the correct exposure so our photographs weren't too dark or too light.
We got, 1/60 for the shutter speed, f5.6 for the aperture and 400 for the ISO, this gave us a good looking picture.

We then went on changing the shutter speed to get a under exposed, over exposed photographs and a photographs with the correct exposure.

I took the photograph on the right with a shutter speed of 1/100 and and an aperture of f5.6 this meant my picture was too bright, over exposed. 

I took the photograph on the left with a shutter speed of 1/10 this meant my picture ended up under exposed.

Changing the shutter speed controls the amount of light that is let into the photograph, having a quick shutter speed means that not a lot of light is let in make the picture under exposed. I would be able to fix this but changing the aperture on my camera to smaller f-stop. This will mean I could take a picture at a quick speed and it won't be under exposed.

Photoshop : Retouching

Retouching

On the right is the original photograph of the blemish, I have chosen the freckle on her nose to photoshop. i will be using the Healing Brush Tool. This means I need to click on a good part of the skin next to the freckle and then click on the blemish. This will match the skin colour well and get rid of the freckle.

On her lip there's a spot on her lip and a freckle above it. Using the Spot Healing Brush Tool I was able to get rid of them easily and make them look like they were never there. I also got rid of the shadow at the side of her mouthThis tool can only be used for a few things because it can create some blur if you use it too much in on place.

 There were some blemishes between her eyes and I was able to get rid of this with the Patch Tool. this allowed me to circle the troubled areas and drag it to a good part of her skin and double it. This gives the appearance of clearer skin and it has a good colour match