Exploring Photoshop - Displacement maps & creating texture on an image

In todays lesson we were working on placing textures on our photos. The images I chose to use were my usual photograph of Sean and a scanography image I created with leaves and sticks yesterday. I wanted to try and layer the leaves image over Seans face but in a way that the image curved to fit his face, not lie flat on it.

The first step was to select a channel with a the most contrast. To do this I switched from the layers palette to the channels palette and flicked between the three colours there; red, green and blue. For my image the blue channel was the one with the most contrast. 

I now needed to duplicate this channel, to do this I right clicked on the channel, selected duplicate channel, renamed it Displacement Map and clicked okay. A copy of the channel then opened up in another tab so I could make further changes to it. I then added the median filter to this image by going to Filter > noise > Mediun & changing the radius to 8 pixels. After that I went on to apply the gaussian blur.

After applying the blur I converted the displacement map to grayscale to avoid having any problems with too many channels later. I then saved the displacement map and went back to the original image.

I selected the area which I wanted to apply the texture, which was Seans face and then saved that selection. I then copied the texture image (The leaves) over to my original image and resized it to cover Seans whole face. After that I changed the blend mode of the texture layer to overlay to make the texture look more realistic.

Now I needed to add my displacement filter, to do this I went to filter > distort > displace and then changed both horizontal scale and vertical scale to 15. After clicking okay another box came up so I could select the displacement mask I saved earlier. 

After applying my displacement mask the texture on the image looked a lot more realistic and even bent slightly around Seans features. I then cleared up any texture that spilled over is face by using the paint brush tool and cropped the image down.

This is the finished image. I'm actually very happy with the picture on the whole although I did really struggle with blending the texture out around the edges of his face and it still doesn't look perfect. I Although the process is quite long I'm reasonably happy with the outcome and I would really like to try something like this again using new images.

Scannography

In todays lesson we were looking Scannography.  Scannography is a technique used by some artists to create interesting images using only a scanner. To understand the technique and have a look at some examples of scannography I used this website > http://scannography.org

Using pretty much what I had in my bag at the time I decided to create my own Scannography image.

I first placed the objects I was going to capture on the scanner, before opening photoshop. From there I went to File > Import > Images From Device.

I then checked everything was set up how I wanted, cropped the image slightly, and selected Save As IMB so that I can open the image on any computer. 

Here is the original image : 

From there I cropped the image slightly so that the sunglasses were the main focus. I thought the image looking very dark and flat so I turned up the brightness and then the contrast  as well as the saturation slightly to create this image : 

Although this is a very basic image I really liked the results of using just a scanner and I can imagine doing so much with it. I'd really like to create some more scanography in the future with different objects to create more intricate images.

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Exploring Photoshop - Applying Makeup

In this lesson we were experimenting with makeup in photoshop. We were told to use a portrait photo, preferably with no makeup already on so that we could add it all on photoshop. The only half decent photo I had to use that day was this one (sorry Sean). 

We first used the Spot Healing Brush Tool to erase any blemishes, or in this case clear up some freckles. I then smoothed out his face although I've since noticed that I have missed out a large section at the top of his forehead. 

After this I created a new layer, named it 'Eyeliner' and proceeded to add some faint eyeliner along the lower lash line. To do this I used the brush tool, changed the colour to black, tuned the opacity down to 10% and painted it on with small strokes.

Once I was happy with that it was time to add some eyeshadow so again I created a new layer and name this 'Eyeshadow'. Using the Lasso tool I carefully drew a line around the eyelids where I wanted my digital eyeshadow to go. To unsure the eyeshadow looked somewhat natural and blended well on the eyelids I then went to Select > Modify > Feather > And chose a radius of 30 pixels. I then played around with the saturation on the selected areas until I was happy with the colour of the eyeshadow.

I continued with the same process of creating a new layer, selecting an area and playing around with the colours in that area until I had added, lip colour, blush, hair colour and whitened the eyes. 

It was important to create a new layer with each area of the digital makeup as it made it very easy to delete areas I was unhappy with without having to undo hours of work.

By the end of the lesson this was the finished image:

I don't particularly like the image, because I don't feel like it looks very natural and I think it will take a fair bit of practice for me to be able to use this technique and be happy with it. Saying that I would like to do something like this again as I think it will come in very handy when I start to work on portrait and fashion shoots.

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2014 British Wildlife Photography Awards Exhibition

On Saturday 31st of October I headed over to Gloucester to see the British Wildlife Photography Awards. This touring exhibition shows off the winning and highly commended photographs from this years competition. I managed to get a few pictures of the photographs and the layout of the exhibition before a member of staff walked in so I thought it was worth posting them here. 

The exhibition was set in a small country house museum called Nature In Art that often holds art shows and craft fairs. Although the exhibition space was quite small and basic ( It was set in 2 rooms and a corridor) I felt the overall setting in the middle of the countryside was perfect for an exhibition all about British nature.

There were several categories in the competition but my favourite by far was the black and white photos. I also loved the Botanical Britain category which featured several macro shots and some very vivid floral photographs.

I'm hoping to write up a post evaluating my favourite and least favourite photographs from the show soon as I think it will help me to be critical of my own work in the future. 

I really enjoyed the exhibition, some of the photos were incredible and clearly took a lot of work and patience to produce. For one of the assignments this year we have to go to an exhibition and review it. I've been to see a few over the last couple of weeks and I'm still choosing which one I want to write about but I'm very tempted to pick this one. 

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Castle & Conservation Exhibition

Last week while on holiday in Cornwall I visited a photography exhibition on St Micheal's Mount just outside Penzance. The Exhibition was showing the conservation work that happens on the Mount, the Castle and the Causeway all year round. 

The exhibition was curated by professional photographer and Island guide Mik Allerton to raise awareness of the challenges faced by National Trust staff everyday.

The set up of the exhibition was very basic and clearly on the cheap side of things but I thought it was quite effective. Although it was a small exhibition I felt like the photographs were carefully chosen to show the important work that the staff and community do in order to keep this unique property running.

Although it was small and simple I really liked the exhibition and I've even toyed with the idea of reviewing it for one of my units, however I would like to see more photography shows before making my mind up.

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Experimenting with Double Exposure in Photoshop

In this mornings lesson we were asked to create some double exposure style images using Photoshop. I've been using Photoshop for a while now but I'd only ever really used the basics so I was nice to learn how to do new things. Although the aim of the lesson was to produce a double exposure image using the ones we had taken over the weekend, we were also shown how to use several other tools which I'm sure will come in handy in the future. 

For my image I decided to use a landscape shot I took in Brighton last year and mix it up with a photograph of Sean I took earlier in the week. These are the original photos :

To create my new image I first opened both of the images I wanted to use into photoshop. To stack the images on top of one another I went to File > Scripts > Load Files Into Stack. 

A window then appeared and I clicked 'Add Open Files'.

Both of my photographs were then stacked together in a new window but they were both opaque. To start the double exposure effect I needed to move my portrait image so it was the top layer and I selected Lighten in the Layers Palette. 

To get the image looking exactly how I wanted I added a Layer Mask to the background image and used the Brush Tool to change how much of the one image was visible on the other. By painting with black and white I could control how opaque the Portrait image was over the Landscape. 

I decided to bring out the eyes and lips and have the rest of the face just about visible so the whole thing looked like it was floating. I compleatly erased any sign of the background and Sean's shoulders from the image as I didn't like the way it looked. This is the finished image :

After compleating the double exposure style image I was asked to make the canvas bigger so another photo could be added. I decided to stick with the same theme and use another photograph I had taken in Brighton. This photo was taken from Brighton Peir looking inland :

This time we weren't asked to merge this photograph with the other, we we told to position it next to the existing photo and find away to stick the two together using the Brush Tool. I changed the brush shape into the shape of a Maple Leaf (something I didn't realize could be done until this lesson) and began working on bringing the two photos together.

I decided to spray on the leaves randonly around the two photographs until the join between them could no longer be seen. I didnt want the leaves to be all one colour as I thought it the whole thing would look better and blend nicer if they were differnt colours and shades. To keep the same colour scheme I picked up colours from the two images as I didnt want the leaves to look out of place.

So this is the finished image. I don't think it will be winning any prizes any time soon but it was good to get to use some new tools and try out some new techniques I hadn't used before. I'd really like to do something like this again in the future as I was quite happy with the results.

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My Top 3 photographers

For my first blog post I've been asked to write about 3 of my favourite photographers. Trying to choose just 3 artists to write about was a bit of a challenge but  i managed to whittle it down to 3 photographers who each work in a different way.

- Brandon Stanton -

The first photographer I want to talk about is Brandon Stanton. He works primarily as a portrait/ street photographer. He started his Humans of New York project in 2010 to photograph 10,000 New Yorkers and plot their portraits on a map. The project grew and he started to document quotes and short stories from his subjects to accompany their photographs. Brandon is currently travelling the world photographing people and as of last week he is documenting the Syrian Refugee crisis at an incredibly personal level. 

- Bill Brandt - 

For my next photographer I have chosen Bill Brandt. Brandt was a German born photographer and photojournalist. Although born in Germany, he lived in Britain from the age of 5 and would later disown his heritage claiming he was from South London. He gained notoriety from his work on British life and went on to publish two books documenting all aspects of British society. Although it was his documentary style photography that made him famous I prefer his more artsy pieces, in particular his series of nudes. He died in 1983 aged 79 in London and is considered by many to be one of the most important British photographers. 

- Melvin Sokolsky -

The last artist I wanted to talk about is Melvin Sokolsky. Born in 1933, Sokolsky was an American Photographer and Film Director who primarily worked with fashion, beauty and commercial photography. Some of his most well known work was shot for Harpers Bazaar such as his famous Bubble series which features models suspended in huge bubbles around Paris. Towards the end of the 60's Sokolsky moved towards film production, working as a cameraman and a commercial director, but he never gave up print photography.

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What Will Be Here?

I'll be using this little space on the internet to document my photos, ideas, research, experiments and over all progress as I work towards my HND in photography. I'll be posting my own images as well as any inspiration or ideas I find. This blog will be my online scrapbook or diary of my photography work while I'm at Uni that I'm hoping to regularly update.

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