Digital Photography & Imaging - Exercises


28/08/19 - 1/10/19 (Week 1 - 6)
Kyra Binti Rizal Hamzah (0337085)
Digital Photography & Imaging
Exercises


Instructions



Exercises

Exercise 1 (Week 1) - Module introduction. Mr Jeffrey showed us how to do our first task, editing a photo of a person into a photo of the Hearst mansion. In class, we tried doing it with photos of superheroes or movie characters in general, but for the exercise itself we are to use a photo of ourselves.
Things we were taught to do using Photoshop:
- Transparency masks
- Match colour
- Adding noise
- Select / Smart select
- Making a shadow out of your photo of a person (use gaussian blur!!!)

1.1 -The original photo of  Hearst Mansion


1.2- The photo I used for practice during class

1.3- The finished practice edit


When doing the practice in class (pictured above) the main things I struggled with were finding where the different tools were in Photoshop as I have very little experience in editing photos using the software. I also had a hard time figuring out the placement of the reflection of the characters in the water in the mansion.

By the time I got around to editing the photo of myself  into the mansion(below), I got the hang of Photoshop's tools and shortcuts a bit more. The main struggle this time was positioning the shadow. In my initial trial run, the placement of the characters made the shadow placement an easy task, but with the photo of myself, as I had to place it at the edge ( since I'm not capable of flying, or making myself appear as such how Mysterio does ), I had to figure out which direction to place the shadow in based on the light sources in the mansion photo.

1.4- The photo of myself that I used for the exercise 

1.5- The final edited photo


Exercise 2 (Week 2) 
Things we learnt to do:
- Different type of layer blending modes (we used screen layer for the ghost house)
- Masking
-Transparency
2.1- My edited ghost house
2.2- The picture of the sky I edited behind the picture of a house we were given

2.4- This week's exercise: replacing the sky in a photo.
Feedback: Mr Jeffrey liked that I thought of mirroring the picture of the sky. I did that cause I found that without mirroring it, the light and shadows from the sky didn't look right against the back of the house. He pointed out that the right corner of the house looked a bit blurry, which I fixed after realising some of the greenery around the house needing to be masked as well, to make it look more realistic.

Exercise 3 (Week 3)
Today we learnt how to recolour black and white portraits by masking parts of the photo (ie the hair or the face) then colouring them in on seperate layers. We were mostly showed to do it using the Colour blending mode but I played around a bit with other modes as well.


3.1- The photo we were given for our initial practice 
3.2- My coloured version of the photo


3.3- The photo I chose to use for this exercise

3.4- My recolour of the photo I used
The biggest challenge for me in this exercise was trying to select the hair for masking, especially since in the original black and white photo, it almost blended into the hat. I did have to duplicate the original photo to a new layer and decrease the contrast before selecting the hair for masking, to make it more visible.

Exercise 4 (Week 4)
Today we learnt to add textures to pictures by using displacement maps and multiply blending mode.


4.1a- texture used for practice
4.1b- flag to place on texture
4.1c- Flag edited onto the silk
4.2a- Face used for second practice
4.2b- Texture to put on face
4.2c- Edited photo

4.3a- Photo of cat

4.3b- Photo of a tree 

4.3c- edited leafy cat ( I was thinking of pokemon)
4.4a-a turtle

4.4b- some rocky mountains

4.4c- A rocky turtle XD

Exercise 5 (Week 5)
This week we had to edit a picture of a castle onto a floating rock and add a sea or some sort of horizon below it.

5.1-Rock I used

5.2- Castle I used 
5.3- Mountain I added below the rock for the horizon


5.4- Photo of the sky I used. I actually took this here on campus XD

5.5- Final outcome

Feedback: Mr Jeffrey said my technique was mostly good, just that I needed to dodge the rock a bit to get rid of some of the shadows and make it look more realistic, so I made the changes to my piece as such.

Popular Posts