AVGPinky

Ahhhhhhhhh an exciting update my green screen has just arrived!!!! I have set it up but haven’t actually got to using it just yet. I brought a green screen 3 meters by 6 meters. A 3 meter frame and two sets of umbrella lights. Hopefully this will make editing photos allot easier.

Since the previous post I have finished editing out the suspended girl from the background and the hair to as good of a quality that I could with the lack of a green screen used on the original image.

I have since then been figuring out how to edit the photos and put them into different backgrounds to do this effectively I have to change the saturation, rescale the image so its relative to the background, distort the image so it is the same perspective as the background and also create and place the shadow of the image to make sure it is as real as possible.

I wanted to put the images into more realistic backgrounds the images in Sam Taylor-Woods, Clare Strand and Joel-peter Witkin photographs are all realistic backgrounds and as I am using either images with a background already or images on a screen the background will have to be edited in later.

With the 1^st picture I used the already edited image from blog post 6 and then edited it onto a picture I found on Google images. I have used images off Google for all of my tester photographs, later I would like to take the photos I’m using as the background myself too. To add my image to this background I had to position the background and crop it accordingly. I then had to place my photograph into the image she had to be right at the front of the image as her feet are not in the photo this did however make editing and placing her easier. I decided to place her slightly to the left as not to make her the centre of attention to the picture as this would look too fake as the perspective was wrong. I then had to pull the saturation right down as the woman was in black and white and the background was in colour.

The second and third image I made to look like she was floating in a room much like she is in Sam Taylor-woods ‘self-portrait suspended’ series. With this image I had to change the size of the suspended girl. I also had to take into consideration the lighting is above her so it would cast a shadow which I had to make I did this by duplicating the layer with the girl on. I then lowered the lightness so it was completely black. Finally I added a Gaussian blur so they look more natural to the type of light that was above her. I had to do this 3 times as there is three lights above her I then had to judge where I thought the shadows should be and place them appropriately. One thing I don’t like about this image is the hair again it was not done to the standard I want but that is due to the quality of the original image and the lack of a green screen. Another fault would have to be that the editing isn’t completely done I still need to take out the cushion she is being supported by. To make the third image I then just changed the saturation of the girl to make her black and white with the room still in colour as I felt it looked quite interesting.

The fourth image was the most difficult to edit so far. Again using the image I had used in the previous two photographs. I had to place her into a background of a derelict building. The image itself was black and white so I first had to change the saturation of the girl to black and white to match the background. I then had to shrink the girl down to a suitable size to fit the building. I wanted it to appear like she was levitating parallel to the concrete beams above her to do this I had to distort the layer so she was in the right perspective. I then had to do the same as the above image to get the shadows right.

Removing the background on some of my photographs.

When I originally attempted to create my piece of work in the style of Taylor-woods it was not done to a very good standard. I attempted it as a tester or demo piece with the intentions of if it worked well I would find a way to make it work better.

My make shift green screen (a White sheet hung up behind the suspended model) and suspension technique (seen in blog post 1) worked well for demonstration purposes but it limited the space I could use and also how easy the final picture was to edit.

The fact that the sheet was white, covered in creases as well as bad lighting and thickness of the sheet all played a part in making the editing near impossible.

As his was my 1^st time using Photoshop I hadn’t found the best way to do certain jobs yet so many of the images didn’t turn out as natural as I would have liked them to look, for example in her arms her you can clearly see the lines where I have attempted to remove the rope and re touch her skin up. I feel with the more time and effort I put into learning about Photoshop over summer and this year I can really improve the quality of the images doing this and other experiments again.

I have attempted to edit out the bad background and replace it with a plain colour background or another image or scene and this is going reasonably well however with a proper green screen the result would be much better as deciphering skin / hair from the grey background exactly pixel by pixel proved difficult with such a close colour.

This is how close I managed to get to an exact cut out of Laura’s body to put on a separate background her body was the easy part doing the hair on such a close colour background to her blonde hair was impossible so I would like to try again using a different background.

Some Photoshop Practice

I started with this picture I thought it would be an easy image to practice editing out the background of as it has a mostly white background with a mostly black image that I was to keep with no hair or little details that could be hard to edit out. The image was also taken in high resolution so it would in theory be easier to edit as the detail and definition of the image would be of a good quality therefore less pixilation. However the size of the image due to the high resolution made it hard for Photoshop to cope with the image.

I started by copying the white wall background over the black stones and shadow at the bottom of the picture using the “clone stamp tool” to copy part of the white background over the dark bits I want removing I do this so it is easier for the “quick select tool” to decipher what part of the picture is the background and which is the actual picture.

I then used the ‘Quick Select tool’ too select only the girl in the image putting her in a new Photoshop layer removing her from the background. I then made another layer completely green and put it behind her to check if she was cropped properly.

I could then make another layer and find an appropriate image to use in the background of the picture. The image I chose just for experimental purposes was this outer space picture. I then changed the layer type to ‘lighten’ to create the affect seen in this image.

I was left with two end images. I was happy with both images the one with the layer lightend as I feel it was effective as it is just the abaya that you can really notice the effect on so just her eyes and hands look normal. With the image without the layer effects on you can just see the detail in the woman compared with the background just so you can see how well cut out she was from the origional background.

The rolling stone is a magazine that has come out every two weeks since 1967. It focuses on politics and popular culture. I am interested in it as they always have a unique cover photo on every issue of a famous person, band, figure. I am very keen to look into more detail on the change in editing styles and quality of the editing over the years from the 1^st issue to how they are done today.

The first few cover photos were all done by Poster print and were all simple, easy and basic. The editing on issue number 46 was just the text on top of a picture. This compared with the editing in issue number 217 just 7 years later has already changed to a slight crop out cut around the images of the Beatles still not done too well rather blurred and basic.

If we skip a few years ahead to issue number 810 published in 1999 you can already start to see the change in detail, not just in the skill in editing also in the background colour and resolution. It is clear to see this in the detail of the hair on resent issues such detail was unheard of in the first few issues. Even comparing the hair in issue 810 compared with issue 1132 and 1176 every strand is picked up in phenomenal detail.