Photography L3 : Unit 1: Digital

Personal environments brief/Opening/Editing my images using Photoshop:

In class we looked at some photographers and their work depicting social environments. Some of these photographers included Joel Meyerowitz, William Eggleston and Richard Billingham. After discussing some of their images we were asked to go and take three photographs displaying environments that related to us. Instantly a composition sprang to mind, there was a portrait of my grandma that I had wanted to take for quite some time but hadn't yet got round to it, this seemed like the perfect opportunity. When I sit talking to her at her breakfast table the way the natural light comes through the window to her right subtly draws out the details and textures in her skin and provides a soft natural look in her eyes. also the photographs of the grandchildren in the back of the frame contribute to the emotion of the composition. As I was shooting I had an idea to shoot a series of 3 images exploring this specific environment.

Non Destructive editing: After opening my original image in Photoshop I duplicated it onto a new layer for editing to ensure that the original image data would not be lost.

The levels tool allows you to adjust the the tonal range of an image. This means you can edit the shadows, mid tones and highlights of the image.

The curves tool allows you to make more specific changes to the tonal range of an image. The user can place up to 15 anchor points along the curve so that the contrasts can be fine tuned .

Re-sizing images for web use:

When uploading your work to the internet it is important to compress your images for two main reasons:

So that the file size is smaller than the original. When shooting in RAW file sizes often exceed the upload limit on most websites. Compressing the files to JPEG Reduces file size dramatically.

I used the image size tool in Photoshop and scaled my image down to an eighth of the size. this took the file size down to 257kb.