This week's workshop was focusing only on the assignment that's due in on the 6th November. Following the previous test photos and mock idea I still wasn't sure if I wanted to submit any of them as a final piece, so I went outside with my camera during the workshop and began work on my second mock idea.
For this I decided to use water as a primary focus in the image, so I got several different photos and returned to edit them in Photoshop. After looking at them, several could be immediately deleted as they were grainy, noisy and beyond repair. I decided to keep 4 of the best for later use. These were mostly undersaturated and had lighting problems, and in many of them there leaves in the water so these had to be edited out.
The following images are comparisons between the original photo and the final photoshopped version, but have been resized for display and upload limit purposes:
This photo was a test to see how the water would look if it was not directly focused on it, and therefore wasn't as detailed. This would be useful in future simply as a layer mask if water in another photo needed extra texturing. In this photo the light levels have been adjusted and the saturation increased.
This photo is deliberately oversaturated and has a very high contrast. This is because I only intend to use this photo for the water, so the sky, buildings and general lighting can be disregarded. A mild cooling filter has been added to this photo to make the water look as if it is reflecting a clear blue sky, and this has its advantages over simply increasing the saturation, as there is no chance that artefacts or noise will appear.
In this photo I have greatly increase the saturation, added a cooling filter and adjusted the light balance to make the image look more appealing. For example, you can see at the lower right of each photo that the darkness levels have been adjusted so blacks appear darker, and a similar effect has been applied to the whites. I think this gives the photo a more professional look, as there are examples of both extremes (perfect white and perfect black) in the image.
After experimenting with the above images during the workshop I continued the work at home, and put togther a second mock idea that could be used as a final submission.
