Digital Photography & Imaging

Lecture 4

Introduction to Photoshop 3 Adjustment Layer & Filters

Adjustment Layer
Adjustment layers are a group of non-destructive image editing tools that add colour and tonal adjustments to your image without permanently changing its pixels. You can edit and discard your adjustments or restore your original image at any time.

Basic understanding of Adjustment Layer
When adding an adjustment layer to your image, a new layer will appear over your image and a "Properties" panel specific to the type of adjustment you've selected will pop up. The Properties panel will allow you to modify your adjustment layer, which in turn will modify your image.

1. Brightness/Contrast

It makes adjustments to the tonal range of your image. The Brightness slider is for adjusting the highlights in your image and the Contrast slider is for adjusting the shadows in your image.

2. Level

Levels modify the tonal values in an image by adjusting the levels of the shadows, mid tones, and highlights. It's one of the most used tools in the adjustment layer panel, and using just a touch of levels will go a long way in correcting your images.

3. Curves

Curves let you adjust as many points as you want throughout the entire tonal range of your image, and you is the most powerful and precise tool for editing the tones in an image.

4. Exposure

Exposure lets you adjust exposure levels with three sliders: Exposure, Offset and Gamma.

Exposure - will adjust only the highlights of the image

Offset - adjust the mid tones

Gamma - adjust the dark tones only

5. Selective Color

The selective colour adjustment layer selectively modifies the amount of a primary colour without modifying the other primary colours in your image.

Filters

There are filters to change colour, add blur or create completely new image effects. Photoshop offers a virtually unlimited variety of filters for this purpose.

Photo filter trick in Photoshop - https://youtu.be/gDSbfx67MLg

Reference:

How to use Adjustment Layer. - https://bit.ly/3uZzhGL
Photo filter trick in Photoshop - https://youtu.be/gDSbfx67MLg
Photoshop filters - https://fixthephoto.com/photoshop-filters.html#:~:text=Photoshop%20image%20filters%20are%20defined,retouching%20and%20improve%20image%20quality

Practical 4

1. PROJECT 1B - PART 1: Hearst Mansion- Follow instructions from the W4_HEARST MANSION:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Uc5UY-PjqTCImigtHk8qh6vUuutTZw8qAjJHiNXjPOM/edit?usp=sharing

2. PROJECT 1B - PART 2: Recoloring Black and White Follow instructions from the W6_RECOLORING BREAKDOWN:
EXERCISE 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tye0ULqK9SQ
EXERCISE 2: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bmNokgEamSgp0wzdGl-6sggcNrVI1JtY/view

Demos:

Project 1B - Part 1

We learned how to photoshop a person into a picture, first starting with a tutorial of photoshopping Shazam, and later our own picture.

We first used Quick Selection Tool to crop out the person. Later, after resizing the person into the picture, I made Image Adjustments for the person to blend into the picture, fixing the colour, light and shadow. I added a noise filter to make it more natural in the picture. I added shadow to the figure and used Gaussian Blur to make it look more natural with a lighter opacity level.

Fig 2.1

I created a reflection by copy pasting the person, and reflected it vertically. I added Hue/Saturation to make the colour similar to the water, and added a ripple effect too.

I repeated this process with a picture of myself.

Fig 2.2

I did this as my first attempt, but was not satisfied with the outcome, as I felt that I was too small and the colour was off, so I re-did it.

This was my first attempt, and my second attempt is posted below.

Fig 2.3

Submission:

Part 1 A (Shazam)

Fig 2.4

Part 1 B (Myself)

Fig 2.5

Project 1B - Part 2

For this task, I needed to recolour a black and white photo. First I used the Marquee tool to crop the hair and skin colour reference for my picture and pasted unto another layer of the picture I want to recolour. Using the brush and eyedropper tools, I picked out the Highlight, Midtone and Shadow.

Fig 3.1

I used the Quick Selection Tool to select the hair and used Select and Mask to refine the selection. I created a Mask Layer. Creating another layer, I made a Solid Colour layer, inserted the hair Mask Layer into the new layer and changed the blending mode to Soft Light. I repeated this process with different parts of the photo - skin, eyes and teeth, lips, earring, fur jacket, and background.

Fig 3.2

I repeated this process with other pictures that I have selected in the folder of black and white pictures that is provided. I choose to practice on two pictures.