This final assignment asks to apply all you’ve learnt in the course to build a collection of 10-12 final images on a theme of your choice.
When you’ve completed your collection return to the briefing that you set yourself at the start and consider how well your completed project matches up to your original intentions. Write a reflective account (around 500 words) to accompany your images. Here’s a few ideas:
* How did you choose your theme? Was it a good choice?
* What went well, what went badly?
* Did you stick to your original brief or did you find yourself departing from it? Why?
* What technical problems did you experience and how did you solve them?
* Are you pleased with your final collection? What could you have done differently?
Background
When I first read through this module I had difficulty thinking through what I would like to feature in my personal project. I always panic at having to think up a new idea to work on as my brain just shuts down. Gradually, as I think it through, and sometimes discuss my lack of ideas with my tutor through email, ideas start to develop and it comes together.
Over the past few months outside of my OCA project and assignment work I have been working on creating photo art from some of my pictures of Lyme Regis. This involves taking the original picture image and apply one (or more) of the effects available in Photoshop’s extensive filter gallery. I have many images that I have taken out and about around the town and surrounding district and felt I could produce an interesting and varied portfolio of different pictures. In fact, the main problem was in choosing just 10-12 pictures to feature.
I've featured The Cobb harbour and its surrounding area, as it is the one thing that visitors to the town make for first of all. There are so many different views and, as a resident, I was able to draw on pictures taken during out of season where the harbour is virtually empty of boats rather than it is now in the high season of June and July.
I wanted to create a set of eye-catching images that would look as if I had painted them rather than photographs. I’ve seen some very good examples of photo art featuring Lyme Regis and thought that I could do as well, if not better than the professional photographers.
I used the filter gallery of Photoshop CS5 which, when you first look at it, can be quite confusing as there are a large number of different styles available. On top of that there are variations of each style available to change with sliders to make the images more to your liking. Once I got into adjusting the automatic choice of each filter, it became quite exciting to see how much I could change the picture away from the original without losing it’s character.
One thing I found was that I went back to the same filter time and again. Whilst there are so many other ways of altering the image, I like the block colours of the ‘Cutout’ filter and, whilst I adjusted the levels in each to suit the picture’s style, I preferred the overall filter to many of the other ones that were available. Once I had tried the artistic, brush strokes and sketching filters my preference kept coming back to the ‘Cutout’ filter so I tended to work with that one. Sometimes I would add the cutout filter then save the image and then go back to the saved image and add another filter to that. It got quite difficult to keep up sometimes with the different filters that I used. I found that unless I wrote each one down as I went along I was unable to recreate it successfully again.
To what extent do you feel you have succeeded?
I've really enjoyed this assignment even though I hadn’t done much in the way of photo art before. I had seen various examples of it (sometimes known as digital art) and thought that I could successfully create images along those lines.
The pictures that I have produced have really excited me as I always wanted to be able to draw and paint and my abilities in that area have been sadly lacking. This way, with photo art, I’m able to do the very thing that I was unable to create using paints and brushes. I have attempted to use the filter gallery in the past and always imagined it would be fairly simple. I found in reality that, with the various graduations of colours in the sea for example, that colour ran over into other colours and I needed to correct them to show it correctly. I did leave the original colours in some instances but in the aerial view of The Cobb, for example, there were blue sea colours where there should have been grey graduations for the harbour walls. Reluctantly, as I was worried that I would ruin it, I decided to recolour those areas and found that I could improve the whole rather than change it to something that didn’t look authentic, so perhaps my artistic abilities could come out in that small way rather than be able to create a whole image from scratch.
Technical Details
Whenever I first read through an assignment in any module my mind would go blank as I panicked over what my theme could be. It’s always the same for me as, just like in written exams where you had to read right through a paper when the exam started, I immediately think there were no questions I could answer. When I read through again more carefully my brain unfroze and I recognised items that I could answer. The same thing happened to me with the DPP assignment 5 when I read through the whole module on its arrival that first week. Then I put it to one side in the hope that inspiration would grab me when I got to it. Luckily, by the time I reached the point of starting it, something had come to mind, which I could email my tutor about to see how it could be developed into a whole assignment.
This thought process happened earlier than usual when I came to the end of assignment 3 as, at this point, I was advised to discuss with my tutor what I would do for assignment 5. I thought about all that I had been working on this year and realised that what I had enjoyed the most was using my own images and changing them into what is known as photo (or digital) art. As I said in my background statement I have always had yearnings to be able to draw and paint but felt I had no real talent for this and this seemed an ideal way to achieve this. This document describes how I set about changing my images into photo art. As the technique is very similar in most of them I’ll describe the first picture in detail then only describe how I used any different effect to achieve the finished picture.
Blue Anchor at Sunrise
I’ve used this picture several times over past modules as a start point with my assignments. It was taken a couple of year’s ago when there had been an overnight fall of snow on Lyme Regis. I was out early enough to take some pictures before other people had left footprints in the recent snowfall.
When I studied this image more closely I noticed the interesting colours in the sky and thought they might translate into graduated bands of colour when a filter was applied. It was a fairly straightforward application of the Cutout filter with Levels set at 8 to give a wider distribution of colours than at the default setting.
I felt this image needed no further tweaking so left it alone with regard to any other filters or colours. The icing on the cake, so to speak, was the bird sitting on the top of the anchor. See below for finished image:
Bluebells
The Bluebells have been magnificent this year but the pictures I planned to use were taken a couple of years ago on the hillside overlooking Lyme Regis. I like the picture that I chose to use as it has dappled sunlight amongst the trees and flowers and a path leading up from the bottom right hand side of the picture which leads the eye into and around the whole image.
Manipulated Image
This is one of my more successful manipulations. I like the way the colours have changed into bands of strong colours as you look through the trees. I had some problems with the colours as some of the trees took on the blue/purple hues of the flowers rather than tree colours so I had to step in and recolour several areas. This was done by selecting the area I wanted to change using the magic wand, changing to the eyedropper tool to select a more suitable colour and filling with the selection using the Paint Bucket. I had to work my way down the tree trunk isolating the areas that needed to be changed but I thought it looked better when I had finished.
I didn’t want to overdo this picture as I felt it attraction was in its simplicity rather than making it look over-coloured.
Aerial View Cobb Harbour
Manipulated Image
I’ve been taking high view pictures of the Cobb harbour for several months, as I wanted a portfolio to show all the four seasons from one vantage point, so I had quite a collection from this particular viewpoint. This is the picture I decided to use for this image even though the foreground is slightly dark. I thought it would give atmosphere to the image but decided to crop it slightly so that the foreground wouldn’t dominate the picture.
The image you see below is my finished picture. I applied the Photoshop CS5 Cutout from the filter gallery and adjusted it so that it gave bands of colour across the sky and sea.
The various steps I took were as follows:
* I cropped the image to remove some of the dark foreground.
* I adjusted the Levels and Shadows/Highlights to bring out the darker areas of shadow such as the Cobb harbour wall and the back of the houses in the foreground.
* Then I sharpened it as it gave a better finish before I applied any filter. I used the Cutout filter in the artistic section in the filter gallery as this gave bands of colour which I could adjust to see the effect when I moved the slider back and forth. I finally settled on level 7 (the scale went from 1 – 7 which gave more or fewer bands of colour) edges simplicity 6 and edges fidelity at 3. When I used the higher edge simplicity numbers I got more detail in the areas of colour, again the lower the number the less detail in the final image. With edge fidelity, which ran from 1 – 3, I found that there was more detail in the main blocks of colour so I settled for number 3.
* I decided that the image was out of proportion and decided to resize it using Image/Canvas size to 8.5”x4.5” to 8.5”x6”. Having decided how much I wanted to increase the depth, I used the Transform command to change it.
When I sat back to look at the whole image I noticed that several areas of the Cobb wall and North Wall were the same blue colour as the sea. The harbour walls should have been various shades of grey so I decided to recolour them to the appropriate colours.
I also decided to recolour the waves which broke over the far rocks barrier. Originally they were a mid-blue colour but as the waves reached the rocks when it was choppy they went white. I used a paler shade of blue, as I didn’t want these areas to stand out too much. I selected the areas which I wanted to recolour using the Magic Wand, then used the Eye Dropper tool to obtain the correct shade of blue and used the Paint Bucket Tool to fill each area.
I’m really pleased with this image, as it has come out much better than I expected. I like the bands of colour in the sky and the sea and the definition of the houses in the foreground. The colours have blended together in a harmonious colour scheme which has worked well together.
Cobb High Wall
This is a regularly photographed image of the harbour wall in Lyme but it is quite difficult to obtain a well-balanced picture due to the sun being in the south most of the day. The large sweep of wall in shadow turns black unless you have a camera which has a matrix metering system. Even then the camera is fooled into overexposing the shadowed parts, even or even worse, it loses the detail of the coastline behind it.
Manipulated Picture
I used Photoshop Image/Shadows & Highlights to get some detail back into the shadowed area but had to be careful not to overdo the lightening effect, as that would have lost detail in other areas.
Once I had the lighting to my satisfaction I studied the whole image and decided that the small fishing boat would look better if it was moving to the left rather than sailing out of the picture to the right.
I selected the boat by using the oval marque tool with feather set at 3 pixels, pasted it into another document, rotated it 180 degrees and moved it back into place but sailing the other way.
In the original picture there were a number of yellow buoys on the extreme left hand edge which I thought attracted the eye away from the main part of the picture so I decided to remove them using the Clone tool. Removing this distraction allowed the eye to sweep round the length of the harbour wall and focus on the boat at the end.
I opened the filter gallery and worked through the effects available and eventually chose Cutout.
There were no areas of colour that had bled into other areas so I decided to leave it alone. I like the way the bands of dark colours sweep into the picture and take the eye to firstly the horizon and then lead on to the boat.
I thought to change the sky to one colour, eliminating the graduated bands. I tried using the magic wand to select just the sky but it also selected a large area of the sea so I used the cloning tool to recolour the darker blue with mid-blue. On reflection I think this modified picture is closer to the original as the sky, in the original, is mainly one colour and I prefer it to my first attempt.
Surfboards
Manipulated Picture
This is my finished Surfboards image which keeps the bold, bright colours but adds a painted element to the whole effect.
I love this picture for it’s bright and cheerful range of colours. I removed a couple of masts from the background as I felt they would be a distraction from the finished image but, other than saturating the colours slightly and sharpening it, I left it as it was.
I wanted to try a different filter in the Photoshop filter gallery so worked my way through the various artistic effects to see what would show off these glorious colours best. In the end I settled for the Palette Knife effect and adjusted the stroke size to 36, stroke detail to the maximum of 3 and softness to 2 although the max available was 10.
I okayed the selection then went back into the filter gallery to add another filter. This time I used the Brush Stokes effect of Dark Strokes but changed the balance to 5 with the black intensity to 2 and white intensity to 7. This gave a better overall effect as the default black intensity made the whole picture far too dark.
Museum Roofs
I’ve used this image several times during the course of this module and it remains one of my all time favourite pictures of Lyme Regis. I like the way the zoom lens has compressed the length of the sea front and left the background out of focus giving emphasis to the roofs in the foreground. Also the gentle colours of the chimneys and roof slates add interest. I like the bird in the mid distance as I think it adds perspective to the picture rather than detracting from it.
Manipulated Image
For this exercise I removed the bird first as my tutor had remarked, when I used the picture in assignment 3, that he felt it distracted the eye from the whole picture, then sharpened it to get as much definition when I used a filter. I used the Brush Stokes filter on Sumi-e with a stroke width of 3, stroke pressure 1 and contrast 1. I thought it still looked too much like the original photograph so added the Watercolour effect with brush detail up to the max at 14, shadow intensity at 0 and texture at 3. This took the image away from being a perfect copy of the original but left it recognisable with the majority of its colours intact.
I also tried another variation by using the Sketch filter Torn Edges which gave a strong silhouette effect which I liked.
I thought it would take it a step further and colour in dramatic blocks of colour but the background buildings had bled into the sky and as they were undefined they took on that blue colour. I’m not sure I like it with just the two strong colours and need to think about it some more, perhaps add a third paler red to some of the buildings in the background. Not sure where to go with this on really like this finished image, the colours are gentle but sure and the outlines of the buildings are defined sufficiently to give perspective. There is something very pleasing about the whole picture. I still like the bird in it though.
Red Boat
This was a fairly bland picture of a red boat approaching the quay on a dull day. The background is also fairly dull and if the boat weren’t in it there wouldn’t be much to hold your attention. One thing I do like is the juxtaposition of the boat and the stanchion, which compliment each other being placed on the thirds as they are.
I thought I would try something different with this picture; rather than just add a filter from the gallery I had the idea to leave the boat and the stanchion coloured and change the rest of the dull picture to be unsaturated and see how that looked. I was pleased with the result as it made you focus your attention on both coloured items and made the rest of the picture insubstantial. I selected all the grey area and used the Blur filter at 2.5 pixels to blur all the unsaturated areas and thought it made the boat and the stanchion stand out even more.
Manipulated Image
I’d seen adverts on the TV and cinema years ago for the Financial Times where just the paper was coloured its distinctive salmon pink and the rest of the advert was in black and white so I’d had a go with a bright red spotted teacup and bland background and liked that effect.
Beach Silhouettes
This is an original picture that I took a couple of years’ ago at midday in winter. I was surprised and pleased at the silhouette effect I got from the sun and the figures on the beach. I felt that the figures in the mid-ground distracted your eye from the whole image so cloned them out to emphasise the person on the right hand side. I liked the way the man was standing upright, in a mirror image of the lamppost, tall and straight with his shadow at an oblique angle. I could have cloned out the railings along the bottom but thought they could stay as they gave a sense of perspective.
I used the Cutout filter again after I had cropped the image and sharpened it. I changed the default to Levels 8, Edges Simplicity 4 and Edges Fidelity to 2 as this gave sufficient detail on the beach but kept it clean. I cleaned up some areas where the colours had ‘run’ but mostly left it alone as I liked the way the bands of co-ordinating colour held together.
When I was checking for spelling and grammar mistakes I had a close look at the picture again and decided to try another look to see what it looked like with a one-colour sky. I chose the mid-blue colour, selected all the areas of sky and filled it with the blue colour. When I selected the sky I had changed the tolerance of the magic wand to 20 and this had missed the spiral insides of the lampposts. I had to select these separately using the shift key with the magic wand but found I could then use the brush tool, in large sweeps, as it only coloured the selected areas. When I zoomed in I found that the centre whorl of the lamppost had been coloured as well so I used the brush tool on black to recolour the centre areas.
I looked at this new image and compared it to the previous one with a banded sky and decided that I liked the one with the whole block colour better than the previous one so settled for that for my final image.
Cobb Sunset
I took this picture, again on a previous assignment, when I had to investigate low light levels. The slow movement of the waves gave a very calm and peaceful look to it. The photo art image was one of the first ones I worked on that I was entirely happy with. It was simple to achieve and yet the most effective. It showed what was achievable when I used the sliders in the filter gallery rather than leaving the settings on default. I find the complimentary colours, which I admit were selected by the filter, very pleasing to the eye. I was able to adjust the number of bands and how much detail was included in the sand and waves by using the sliders.
Once I’d sharpened the picture to get the best effects from the filters, I adjusted the Hue and Saturation to give the sky a stronger orange colour to get more contrast.
Then I went to the filter gallery and used the cutout filter as this changed the colours into complimentary coloured bands and kept the Edge Simplicity low as it merged the waves and lost detail when I took it up to the maximum.
I thought the waves and beach needed more definition and used the previous saved image with cutout filter to add some brush strokes. In the gallery I experimented with several of the brush strokes and finally settled on the Sumi filter that defined the waves but didn’t give too much detail. I finally went back to the Levels control and adjusted the whole image to give a deeper range of colours to the whole image.
As I said at the beginning of this section, this is one of my favourite photo art images. The colours give a real sense of calm to the whole image. Some people don’t like the people standing on the high wall but I think it gives a sense of scale. One of my best.
Cobb Arms Moon
This picture is another of the series that I took from assignment 3. I went out during the early evening to capture various types of lighting. I had to use a tripod to get the sharpest image but it made the lighting burn out in the most intense areas.
For once I must agree with camera club judges when they say ‘don’t do something just for the sake of doing it’, and I felt that the cutout filter just didn’t work with this picture. As it’s so easy to experiment with all the different effects in the filter gallery, I went through them to see how I could improve this picture after I had cropped in closer. I finally settled on the Glowing Edges filter as it gave a strange, surreal effect to the lighting around the buildings.
In the original set of pictures there was no moon as, at that particular time, it was behind me in the southern sky. I photographed the moon separately and added it later to give a more interesting sky. Then it was just a matter of adding the filter effect and adjusting the filters to give, what I considered, the best effect.
As I’d cropped in fairly close to the buildings I thought it handled the lighting effects better than when the building was smaller in the image. I like the way the sky still had detail visible although I could have moved the slider to eliminate all the banding in the sky. Also, the beach at the bottom of the picture still had some dark detail which I thought gives it more perspective. I could have left it with large areas of black but felt this made it boring so left in the detail in those areas. I think the emphasis on the lit edges of the buildings gives it a strange effect and I particularly like the way the sodium streetlights have changed colour. I think it’s different but very acceptable.
No comments:
Post a Comment