Photoshop Edits

When producing my own magazine, I will need to use Photoshop tools and skills to edit my photographs that will feature on the front cover, contents page and double page spread. To enable us to do this effectively, during our lesson we had a go at using some of the editing tools to crop photos, increase/ decrease the contrast/ brightness, and use the spot heal and clone stamp tools. To show you what we accomplished within  just one lesson, below are a some examples of the original photos and how we edited different aspects of them to change and improve the outlook of them.

From the images above, you can see that for the first tool we used was the crop tool, which allowed us to crop out any unwanted or unnecessary background, or in this case sky, to make the main focus of the image on the planes or object of interest in the photograph.

After cropping, we slightly advanced to adjusting the brightness/contrast of the original image because as you can see from the top image it is very over exposed. To make the Photograph look more realistic and more high quality I decreased the colour curves which darkened the image a little and decreased the overall brightness.

We then moved on to using the spot healing tool. This allows you to remove any unwanted marks/blemishes from a photograph. To display this clearly I used the spot healing tool in this image to erase the spots of off the Dalmatian's shoulders and mainly face.

This technique is known as the colour burst technique where I used the Polygonal Lasso tool on this image to adapt the colours to black and white, outside the frame of the mirror. I used the polygonal lasso tool to select the area inside the area of the mirror, then selected "inverse" followed by turning that black and white.

Erasing the bottles in this photograph required using the clone stamp tool which allows you to take small sections of the background and stamp it over the bottles that I wanted to make disappear from the image. This technique takes quite sometime to complete and is hard to make look realistic and so to ensure that I did this effectively I had to select various sections of the background from different places to avoid having two identical branches next to each other for example.

Although I had already had experience using Photoshop for media at GCSE and my GCSE and A level art up to this point, I really enjoyed experimenting with different techniques that I know will be extremely helpful and effective when editing photographs for my magazine. Also I learnt quite a bit that I didn't know which was very interesting and I know that these techniques will be necessary in order for my magazine to look professional. I found the clone stamping technique the most difficult as it is very hard to try not to make the background look fake and unrealistic and I don't think I have quite mastered it yet. However I know that with more practice it will become a very appropriate tool that I will no doubt use within the production of my magazine, maybe to erase unwanted scenery or objects that may interfere with some images I use. Also the spot healing tool might be very effective for me to use aswell, especially in my Photograph shoots of "bands" or close up shots of an "artist" to erase any imperfections. This would be relevant as erasing imperfections or airbrushing is very common with the production of the majority of magazines, not just music, to get the most clear and flawless images possible.