Digital Photography & Imaging - Week 4

Lecture

Our lecture for this week introduced us to the Adjustment Layer and the

many different features and tools that come with it.

Adjustment Layer:

- The adjustment layer is a group of useful, non-destructive image editing tools that can shift, edit and adjust the tones of the image without permanently changing any of the pixels.

- A new layer gets created whenever the adjustment layer is added to an image, allowing easy access to remove it if needed without having to undo everything.

Brightness / Contrast:

- Brightness / Contrast adjust the tonal range of the image. Brightness is for highlights while contrast is for shadows.

Level:

- Level is similar to brightness / contrast in that it adjusts the shadows and highlights, however level also includes midtones in the image.

- Level is one of the most used tools in the adjustment layer as just creating small changes with it can go a long way with correcting the image.

Curves:

- Curves allows you to adjust the entire tonal range of the image through the different points that you can modify.

- One of the most powerful and precise tools for editing tones.

Exposure:

- Exposure levels are broken down into three separate sliders that can be edited. Exposure adjusts highlights, Offset adjust midtones, and Gamma adjusts dark tones.

Selective Colour:

- This tool allows for the user to select primary colours within an image and modify them and recolour them without interfering or modifying the other colours in the image.

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Tutorial

For our tutorial we were introduced to the next part of the assignment, which was to take one of the three digital collages chosen by our lecturer and adjust it ever so slightly in photoshop using the adjustment layers.

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Practical

Our practical work was to work on the adjustment layers for our selected digital collage.

WEEK 3 - PEN TOOL EXERCISE (BEST COMPOSITION)

DESCRIPTION:

When I was designing this one I originally started with designing the background since I wanted to create an idea after making that. After adding in the zebra coloured circle onto the back, I decided to make this collage be symmetrical in design. I still wanted to utilise the fish as they provided a unique contrast to the black and white colours that were already present. While I was experimenting with how I could lay them out, I noticed that the teal/cyan coloured fish was quite circular in design so I cut out another circle using one of the flat images that was provided and placed it underneath the fish. From there I came up with the idea to place the blue fishes around the centrepiece to create a sort of rotating design. I wanted to use eight fishes but I realised that there wouldn’t be enough space between each fish to make it look nice so I brought it down to six instead.

WEEK 4 (ADJUSTMENT LAYERS & FILTERS )

DESCRIPTION:

For the adjusted version, I wanted to reduce the contrast between the blue fishes and the rest of the image which primarily had blacks, whites, and greys. To do this I changed the Hue/Saturation, Brightness/Contrast, Levels, Exposure, and Selective Colours very slightly so that the contrast would be less sharp.