Project 22: An Improvement In The Weather.

The next project continues along similar lines as the last but this time its more about improving the apearance of the weather in the image rather than making it seem worse.


Here we have a shot that has been taken with the light not quiet at its best resulting in the colours appearing very dull and the overall shot being a little bit of a let down, so how can this be fixed in photoshop? Well suprisingly again its a fair simple process which unfortunatley is made more difficult by the fact that some of the files that are supposed to help you are missing from the course disc (i look everywhere and couldn't locate them, maybe it's just my disc). It tells you they you should find the pre-selected areas presumable made up of the foreground, mountains in the background and the sky on the disc but there just not there so using the selection brush i made them myself. The first area to work on is the foreground, to begin with i used the Levels tool closing up the white and black points to produce a better contrast in this area. Next to give the colours the appearance of more stronger sunlight i used the Hue/Saturation tool using the setting given in the course folder (them being Hue -15 and Saturation +30), this does produce one problem which is the red path becomes very dominat so to fix this i then select Reds from the drop down menu and moved the Hue slider to -10 making it fit more closely with the rest of the colours. With this area finish its time to move on to the sky again i begin by using the Levels tool this time i close up the white point but only alter the black point very slightly because i don't want any pure dark areas in the sky as i'm trying to make the light appear brighter and stronger. Following this i moved to the Hue/Saturation tool but this time i'm only interested in the Cyans colour so selecting this from the drop down menu i can remove this particular colour cast by moving the slider to +15. The final alteration you're told to make is to the mountains in the background as the author whats them much darker to make the city on the hill top really jump out and hit you between the eyes, for this it tells you to use Enhance>Adjust Colour>Replace Colour but i found a better way for me to get the right effect was to just darken it using Brightness/Contrast as it provides the same effect in my eyes. So below you'll find the finished image is it an improvement well yes because it now appears to have been take on a much brighter day because the colours look strong and there's much more contrast and detail visible then in the original. Now the question is can a repeat the process in one of my own images?

For this part of the project i have chosen the above image because it has some of the same problems as the course image in that the light being quiet dull has meant that a lot of the colour and detail has been lost from the foreground so hopefully following the same process i should now have the skills to fix it. Below is the results of my processing, to achieve this look i first selected the foreground and only used the Hue/Saturation tool to bring back the colours that had been lost, what i didn't do was go anywhere near the sky or the background, you may argue that sky could have done with the brightest areas being dulled but i like the way this looks and now with the colours more in keeping with this brightness it makes the whole shot feel right.

I could have gone for a more challenging image to alter but i felt after the previous project and with the work I'd done in this i have a pretty good grasp on how to alter the appearance of the weather and light in my landscape imagery, as i said in the last project I've taken more from this because of how it relates to my personal interest but i still agree with my original thought that i would only use this as a last resort if i wasn't able to capture the conditions i was after, with the weather in this country begin as unpredictable as ever though it might end up being more often then I'd like.

Project 21: A Stormy Sky.

To begin this section you're given a very straight forward and simple project to complete centered around the idea of begin able to alter the appearance of the weather conditions within a photo.



You're given the above photo to work on (which isn't a bad photo to start with) and told to first using the magic wand or the selection brush select the sky, next i need to remove the colour from this area so using Enhance>Adjust Colour>Remove Colour to do this then Enhance>Adjust Brightness/Contrast>Brightness/Contrast to weaken or darken the sky to the point where i was happy with the appearance. The results that i achieved following this process were no where near as good as I'd expected them to be if I'm honest so reverting back to the original shot i attempted my own approach. What i did differently was with the sky selected i went to the Hue/Saturation controls and removed as much of the colour from the sky as i felt was necessary and then used the Brightness/Contrast to pick out areas to strength that had become a little lost or faded in the process. After i was happy with the results it was then time to move onto the foreground, the reason this needs some attention is that now I've played around with the sky it just doesn't appear realistic anymore, the effect I'm aiming for is a look similar to when you have the sun out reflecting off the dark clouds (which makes these appear darker and more imposing) but also makes all the colours seem much brighter too. To do this i first inversed my selection and then again using the Hue/Saturation tool only slightly increased the saturation because i did want the effect to appear to cartoon like in appearance. One added process i did find i had to add was a warm filter because the foreground appeared to have a very strong blue hue to it making it very cold, so by adding a orange filter i was able to remove this to a point and give it more of a neutral feel. Below you can see the final results.







I found this one of the more enjoyable projects because the focus is more on the area of Photography that most interest me, I'm not saying the others haven't been good its just that these kinds of projects i tend to take much more away from. I'd never overly considered adjusting the weather conditions before in my work but i can see how this can be a useful tool because all photographers know sometimes you can't rely on the weather to produce the conditions you're after so having a back up solution is never a bad thing but i still rather only use this process as that.

George Logan.

The best word to describe Logan's work would probably be surreal and in some parts i suppose a little comic. If you take the examples above for example you have a very pregnant statue on Easter Island, clearly not real but it does have a comical air about it. Next you have the plug hole in the road image which is much more believable than the other two but it is a little bit of a mystery to myself as to what he's trying to get across with this idea, could it be to do with the amount of water we waste? Hell i don't know i think I'm clutching at straws with this one. Finally I've used one of my favorite images of his where he's made it appear as if the lorry is trapped in the passing bubble, is it a piece of very good timing or has the bubble been add in post production? This is part of the appeal but the other would be the idea maybe behind it in that when you look at the surrounding landscape it appears green and clean but the one thing that can damage this environment is trapped away in its own little bubble.

Gregory Crewdson.

Gregory Crewdson work is produced in a completely different manner to the other peoples that I've look at so far, where as they use alot of photoshop to produce theirs he does use some but his is more staged. He positions his subjects and then using lighting create these almost dream like images, some softening and colour alteration is add using photoshop but that's about as far as he goes. Clearly there's a different skill set needed to create these kind of shots but no less imagination then anyone else I've look at. As I've said its the dream like appearance of his work that makes it so eye catching but also his use of colours to build and reinforce the moods that he's creating. Out of the three examples of his work here my favorite has to be the middle shot with the child looking up into the light, it feels quiet mystical in away and really draws you in.

Jon Compson.

A lot of Compsons work is based in the world of fashion but one or two pieces i found quiet interesting and felt need a little more study. The three photos above all taken from his site http://www.joncompson.com/ have something in common in that they take something that is familiar to us and distort it in a way that you don't lose the familiarity of the scene but create something completely different. For example with the last shot of the Eiffel Tower he's taken a typical shot of the lower half of the tower and then some close up view of the steel work and combined them all into a single images. As I've said its good because you can look at it and understand what the subject matter is without spending to much time considering it. Another reason why these images work well is the simplicity of them, he doesn't try to over complicate the scenes while giving them a very natural feel.

Joan Charmont.

The first two images here are probably some of her better work the rest like the last one are a little bit strange and if I'm honest some of her stuff is frankly a little scary. She says she gets a lot of inspiration from sci fi short stories and novel's, when you look at her work as a whole (http://www.joancharmant.com/index.php) you can kind of see this because with some of it there's a very futuristic feel about it. On the other hand some of her images are a little off the wall and i wouldn't class as being a photo at all anymore even if they did start life in this way. Don't get me wrong there is merits to what she's doing and i really like the first image I've taken from her site but it's just i don't think her stile of work would fit into the essay i want to right, hers is more in keeping with the final theme. Its still helpful to look at the wide range of images people are creating these days because it shows how much more accepted these kind of images are now.

Erik Johansson.

His work is highly creative and appears to bend our idea of reality but yet his images appear very realistic. Not an easy balance to achieve but he does some how pull it off. Of the three examples i have here my favorite is the middle image where the woman appears to be painting in the sea but actually if you look closely you see she's actually painting a floor to a point but the blending of the images is that good that you'd hardly guess it wasn't a real shot. He says he gets his inspiration from what he sees around him in his daily life and his photography is his way to express the ideas he has in his mind, in that case he's either brilliant or completely insane because some of his work (which can be found at http://alltelleringet.com/ ) is really strange like one shot I've seen where he's got the ironing board out and is actually ironing himself! Its the kind of work that you look at and have to wonder how he did that, that's part of the appeal i think its the need to understand how these effects are created.

How his work relates to my essay I'd say is because his use of digital manipulation is about the limit of what I'd say is acceptable before it becomes something more then just photography, you may agree or you might say that its too much but what you can't argue against is that his work stands out in the field of modern digital photography.