UAL Extended Diploma Year 2: November 2016

For my 'Self Imagery' project I have decided to incorporate the idea of 'self' with the theme of subcultures. A subculture is a select group of individuals who share a common interest; this could be football fans, trainspotters or youth culture such as skin heads, teddy boys and punks. They show there common interest through the clothes they wear, the food they eat and the activities they do. I have decided to use this theme in my 'Self Imagery' project because I am very interested in individuality and identity.

I have decided that I have become very interested in a subculture local to me in Hertford called the 'Celtic Harmony'. I found out about this organisation because I went there as a child and I met a number of them by chance in a Pub that I used to work in. The Celtic Harmony camp is an activity centre whereby families and schools can go to 'travel back in time' and live like a Celt for a day. The members of staff also dress up as Celts and live like them, using no electricity and only eating what would be available to them in 'The Iron Age'.

In the build up to my final shoot I am going to do a lot of research on both subcultures and Celts so I know what would be most effective to photograph when I do my shoots. I will also need to do a number of experimental shoots, I will do both technical shoots and other shoots with the theme of subculture; this will help me learn what works and what doesn't work when shooting this theme. The technical shoots will include using the studio, experimenting with lighting, compositions and shutter speeds. This will be helpful when it come to shooting my final outcome because I can understand already what technical aspects look best. The shoots I will do with the theme of subculture will help my final outcome because I can learn the best and most effective way to portray subcultures.

For my final outcome I will need 20 final images showing off the theme of subculture, the shoot will take place in the Celtic Harmony Camp because the setting is very similar to that of 'The Iron Age', I am doing my final shoot on Thursday 18th; this was arranged by both myself and the manager of the Celtic Harmony camp. I am going to shoot around the camp capturing the idea of subculture, I will do a lot of group shots to show community and togetherness. I am going to mostly show off the types of clothes they wear, the activities they do and the food they eat. There will not be a lot of editing using Photoshop because I want to keep the authenticity of what they are doing, but I may experiment in changes the images to black and white or put an ageing filter to make it look more realistic to the era of 'the iron age'.

In this session, we were experimenting with editing an image on Photoshop. The image we were given was a portrait of a girl. There are many different ways of editing an image on Photoshop. it can done simply (e.g. just turning the image into black and white or putting a filter on it), or it can take a vast amount of time and be quite complicated. The idea for the edit we did today was to turn a simple portrait into something that would be put into a magazine; to do this we got rid her imperfections and made her look more suitable for a magazine/blog. Photoshop or other editing tools are used a lot in the magazine industry, especially in the world of fashion.

First of all, to edit the image below I removed her blemishes, (e.g, her spots and moles) to do this, I used the spot healing tool, which is shown in the image below, to work this tool, you have to go over the blemishes and left click and they will hopefully disappear, it is a very simple tool to use. You can also change the brush size and hardness accordingly to the size and darkness of the blemish.

Next, I used the ‘liquify’ tool, which is found in the filters section on the tool bar as you can see in the image below. With this tool, I edited her right eyebrow so it was more even to the left one. To use this tool you have to change the size of the brush accordingly to what part of her face is being adjusted and simply drag it around with your cursor until the desired part of your image has changed to how you would like. Again, it is also a fairly easy tool to use.

After, I edited her eyes to look more blue, to do this I used the dodge tool, as you can see in the image below. After selecting it in the tool bar, I then had to change the size of the brush to the size of the eyes in the image, and then click on the eye until the colour was to my liking.

Then, I used the ‘hue and saturation’ tool to change the colour of the models lips. To do this you have to use the magnetic lasso tool and select round the lips and then I used the ‘hue and saturation’ tool and experimented with the different colours until I was happy.

To make her skin less shiny, and to even out the tone, I used the ‘clone stamp’ tool. To use this, you have to hold down the alt button and select a small patch of skin that you would like to copy, you then click over the blemishes and they should be covered to one even skin tone. However, this tool can be quite difficult to use as the face can become quite patchy, so you have to experiment with the brush size and to turn the opacity to around 20%. This was probably the most difficult editing experiment I did.

Finally, I changed the levels and curves of my image. The levels corrects the colour balance of the image whilst the curves adjusts the tone of the image.

To add something extra to my image, I then edited a pair of glasses on to the image to make it look like the model is wearing glasses. To do this, I firstly had to select an image from google and open it as a separate image on Photoshop and then , I had to again use the ‘magnetic lasso’ tool to get rid of the background of the image and only the frames of the glasses were remaining. Then I dragged the image of the glasses to the image of the model. Next, the size had to be adjusted to fit the model face; to do this, you have to hold down Ctrl+t and then hold down the shift key so the glasses stay in proportion. To make the glasses look as natural as possible I used the eraser tool to trim the edges and make the glasses look more realistic

These are the before and after images:

Overall, I am very happy with the outcome of my edited photograph, because the blemishes are completely gone and I had to learn a lot of new Photoshop techniques in this lesson to complete it. I picked up the techniques very quickly and applied them very well on to the image. I also added my own technique when I edited the models lips with hue and saturation. If I were to improve my final image I would make sure her forehead is more covered and less shiny to make the images even more flawless. I will definitely experiment with more Photoshop techniques in the future as this was a very enjoyable task.