Revisiting The Past

As i am still looking at memories, i decided to do a photo shoot that was again, based on memories. I had looked at the photographer Angie Buckley who gave me the inspiration for this photo shoot. She collected old photographs of her family and for the people who had died, she had cut out their place on the picture and this represented time passing and people fading. I collected old photographs of members of my family and i got some old looking paper from a craft shop and i scanned all the old images onto the computer and printed them out onto some of the old paper. I felt that this made them look more like old images rather than printing them out onto plain white paper, it wouldn't have the same effect. I then got a crafts knife and cut out a person from the image and placed them in flowers and places which were colourful and bright so that it stood out well and contrasted with it. I also then looked at a similar photographer called Greg Sand who specialises in montages but he did a similar photo shoot but placed a map behind the photo so the cut out parts were not blank it had a pattern behind it. I decided to do this for a few of the photographs as it added colour to it and added some detail from the different roads and colours. This was a photo shoot that i enjoyed doing and it is really simple to do as well it didn't take a lot of time to cut them out but i had to make sure i didn't have a blunt crafts knife and had a cutting mat underneath to protect the surface. If you want to look at anymore of the photographs if you leave a comment i can upload some more for people to see. 

Tutorial On Turning Simple Images To Exciting Images

 I thought i would do a quick tutorial with everyone today to show that even the most plain and simple images that you take can be changed into a more interesting and vibrant image which can catch the viewers eyes. I recently did a photo shoot on a train as i wanted to catch the movement from the train in my images and to create that slight blur to them. I used the image below to work with and edit as i found the colours in the image quite bland and it's quite a dull image on a whole. I wanted to add more to the blur in the image and create a more softer but bolder colour scheme. For this all you need is Photoshop… and a creative mind! 

After you open this image in Photoshop, you need to go into 'Image' and then into the drop down menu and click 'Adjustments' and then click 'Hue/Saturation'. It will then open a box which displays different sliders for colours and saturation so you can control the colour and saturation of the image. 

 

I wanted my image to have a pink tint to it and even though it looks quite bold and grainy, it will fit a lot better with the next step. You can change the slider to any colour you want to have but i felt pink stood out a lot more than the other colours (saying that the dark blue is also very bold). 

After you have changed the colour. click 'OK' and then drag the same image that you started off with over the top of the hue effected image. 

Then go into 'Image' then click 'Adjustments' in the drop down menu and then turn the image into monochrome by clicking 'Black & White'. 

The image should have then changed into monochrome and you shouldn't be able to see the hue image at all. We want to see it though and bring those bold colours through and to do this you need to change the opacity of the MONOCHROME (TOP LAYER) image!! Not the hue image which should be titled as 'background' on your layers menu. I changed my opacity down to 50% as i felt this worked fine for me and i got a mixture of the colour and the monochrome through. 

From this image you can see that there is the monochrome image and the hue image and that you can see a mixture of both images and now you need to resize the images to make it look as if the image is really blurred. 

From this image you can see i resized the top image (the monochrome one) and i made sure that it was bigger than the bottom image itself so i went over my canvas size but, from looking at the image before you can see it stretches out bigger but you can't see the difference. It just adds a soft blur to it. 

If you right click on the black and white image layer so the top one, you can duplicate the layer and from here you get duplicates of the same layer and mess around with the opacity on different layers and you can also add different colours to different layers so you can have multiple hues and you can also mess with the sizing of the images. If you make some smaller than the set image size you will get lines from where the image cuts off so you can have interesting lines in there too. There are a lot of effects you can use from here to create an interesting image and i feel that this was a way for me to turn my simple images into something more bright and powerful.

This was my final image from this tutorial, i had added a couple more layers in there and resized them to add emphasis on the blur but i also ended up using the same photograph but adding about 8 layers in there with a blue and pink hue so i got a really powerful image that stands out a lot more compared to the image i started off with. It also turns an image that isn't exactly sharp and magazine material imagery into something a lot more powerful to look at and more magazine material or for a crazy album cover!

Here is my before and after shot just so you can visually see the difference and compare the two images.

I would love to hear feedback from this tutorial and if any of you have tried it and how it's succeeded for you or even any tips to try for next time.