Exercise 23 Alteration

The final exercise is a deliberate out and out alternation of the content of an image.  There are many possibilities, limited only by imagination and skill but to keep the exercise simple in concept we will concentrate on removing a major element of an image.

Take a photograph which contains one distinct subject.  The aim is to successfully remove this one element.  ‘Successfully’ means that a viewer coming fresh to the picture would not be able to tell that there had been any retouching.

-------------------------------------------------

Grannie’s Teeth Image

I took this image of a set of steps on the Cobb Harbour wall which was made famous in the Jane Austen novel ‘Persuasion’.  It was a very dull day with very heavy cloud cover which made the light very flat (see original image below).

There are several elements of this picture that could be changed (or improved):

·         the flat grey sky
·         the dark harbour wall on the right hand side
·         And the child looking the other i.e., way as she walked round the corner of the harbour.


I started to improve the picture by checking the Levels and lightening the whole image as it was rather dark and dingy.

Levels checked

I lifted the mid-tones as there was very little definition in that area.  This made the right hand wall light and showed more of the detail of the stones.

Once I had set the Levels I went to Image/ adjust/ shadows and highlights but only changed the shadows as I was unable to get much difference by increasing the highlight slider, even to 100%.

Shadows lightened

I selected the sky area only and then used the highlight part of the shadows/ highlight palette.  This brought in some detail but increased the grain in the sky which was unacceptable.  In the end I decided to delete the whole sky area and replace it with a more suitable one.  I used the magic wand, set at 20, to select all the flat grey area and deleted it using the Delete key on the keyboard.

New sky chosen

New sky added

I needed to reorder the layers so that the sky sat behind the harbour area. 

My next task was to remove the child who was facing away from the camera.  I used the Clone tool to cover over the child and replace her with a copy of the harbour walkway surface.  Below you can see that I have removed part of the child.



Once the second child had been removed I checked the whole picture and felt that the other girl needed to be brightened.  I selected the girl using the Quick Mask and used the brush tool to refine it.

Then I used the Levels palette again to lighten and brighten the little girl.  This made her face and brightly coloured coat much more acceptable. 

Here are the two images, before and after, see which you prefer:

 

Exercise 22 Addition

For this exercise you’ll add one element from a different image.  In order to make this les obviously full intervention, the exercise will be in two stages.  The aim is to take a conventional landscape view and render the sky so that it appear ideally exposed with every detail of every cloud visible and textured.  With a cloudy or partly cloudy sky this is frequently a problem.

Set up the camera on a tripod so that you can make more than one exposure in perfect register.  Make two different exposures with the camera on either manual settings or using its exposure compensation.  One exposure should be perfect for the landscape (the sky will be overexposed) and the second exposure should be perfect for the sky with no highlight clipping (the landscape will then be under-exposed).  Process the two images normally without significant compensation and combine these two images as the next step.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 
Roof Tops

Image No : DSC_007.jpg, exposed for the roof tops

Image information: focal length – 18mm, exposure – 1/400^th @ f10, ISO 200.

Image No : DSC_008.jpg, exposed for the sky

Image information: focal length – 18mm, exposure – 1/500^th @ f11, ISO 200.

First thing I have to do is drag a copy layer of the sky exposure on to the roof tops image and select the sky using the Magic Wand tool.

Then I removed the sky using the delete key on the keyboard, flattened the whole image and saved a copy.

Exposed for sky removed and image flattened

I went back to the original two images and again dragged a sky exposed layer on to the rooftops image.  This time after I had selected the sky I used Select/ Inverse to capture the rooftops.  If you look carefully you can see the ‘marching ants’ around the lower part of the image.

I used the delete key again to remove the bottom half of the Roofs image, then flattened the layers and saved the image and you can see the completed image below.



My two images look virtually the same, as they should but it gives you control over the various areas that would normally come out darker. 

Another way of doing the same is to use the HDR facility found in Photoshop from at least version CS4 where you use a tripod and take several images exposed for the various areas of the picture.  A good example would be a church where you would have very dark areas – high roof areas, dark areas – mid level roof areas, mid tone areas – the pews, light tones and very light tones such as a stained glass or glass window. 

The HDR facility takes all the images and combines them into one with reasonable exposure in all the areas and comes up with one image.  If you used a tripod then the images should meld into one seamless image.  Some people like the effect and others find it disconcerting that all areas are exposed perfectly when they would have expected light and dark areas.

I bought this brilliant book

Several years ago, I think it was about 2005 when I was taking classes at the college where I taught, I was trying to develop my Photoshop skills and was recommended a great book called 'How to Cheat in Photoshop' by a man called Steve Caplin. 

It's excellent as it's fairly easy to follow and has a CD and details, for both Mac and PC, on how to create realistic photo montages. My version is still available on the Amazon Marketplace for 52p plus £2.80 delivery:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/offer-listing/0240517024/?condition=used&tag=marketp-21&dev-t=D10SBASHC4I9Q1&SubscriptionId=1BW5SQWXHT1FXDBZGW02&linkCode=xm2&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0240517024

I noticed when I used the website megashopbot.com to check if it was still available that there was a later version, released in 2010 with prices starting at £17.96 including postage for a brand new book.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/offer-listing/0240522044/?condition=new&tag=marketp-21&dev-t=D10SBASHC4I9Q1&SubscriptionId=1BW5SQWXHT1FXDBZGW02&linkCode=xm2&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0240522044

If you want to develop your Photoshop skills then I would certainly recommend it, I've had great fun and produced some realistic images.  I also noticed that there was a version for Elements 10 at £16.76 for a new version.

Exercise 21 Enhancement

This exercise explores the next level of intervention and allows you to make changes that many would say go beyond reality.  At the end of the exercise, you’ll be asked to make up your own mind.

Photograph a close-up, head and shoulders portrait in available or natural lighting. The face should not be receiving direct light.  Make two selections, one at a time, each with its own adjustment.  The first should be the entire face, which you should adjust by increasing the brightness and increasing the contrast.  This effect will draw attention to the face which is standard dodging and should appear natural. 

The second selection and adjustment should of the eyes only, limit this to the iris and pupil, not the eyelids or surrounding skin.  First, exaggerate the colour of the iris by increasing saturation and brightness.  Next try changing the hue.  Save both versions.

 At what point between lightening the face for visibility and altering the eye colour do you consider that you have tamper with reality?  Or are you satisfied that all of this is legitimate?

-----------------------------------------------------

Jasmine

This exercise asked me to change the colour of the child’s face using Hue & Saturation.  Here’s the start picture:

Part One
Jasmine had a naturally pale skin which, if you adjusted it too much became blotchy and showed red patches, so I had to take care not to make too many strong changes using the Brightness and Contrast.  Here’s her face after I had adjusted the B & C:

In fact, at one point I contemplated using the minus part of the slider as this seemed to make her look better than using the plus side of the slider.

Part Two

The second selection and adjustment should of the eyes only, limit this to the iris and pupil, not the eyelids or surrounding skin.  First, exaggerate the colour of the iris by increasing the Hue.  I added in the Colorize as this gave a better colour change.

 

Next try changing the Saturation.  So here we are a blue/grey eyed girl now with orange/brown tiger coloured eyes.

I went on to add extra teeth to her mouth as there were two major ones missing and I felt this would enhance her smile with them replaced.  You can see the gaps quite clearly on both sides of her mouth.  Firstly, I selected the most likely shaped tooth to copy.  Below you can see the two teeth I decided to copy and reshape to fit the shape of her mouth.

The first thing I did was to find a similar shaped tooth in Jasmine’s mouth and copied it, saving it in TIFF format:

Then I adjusted the colour of the new teeth so that they matched the existing ones.

Here’s Jasmine with her new teeth and improved complexion, see what you think?

This whole question is one that not only photographers ponder over.  It can be to some as to how far do you go, others feel that you shouldn’t do anything but it’s hardly anything new as printers in wet film darkrooms were doing the exact same thing but not in such a sophisticated way.  We all remember the dodging, burning, enhancing and either softening or sharpening in the darkroom.

            My own opinion is that slight changes are acceptable but if a printer sets out to deliberately misrepresent a situation then that is unacceptable.  Deliberate misrepresentation can be either to enhance a person’s features/situation or go completely the other way and cause great distress.  In this day of almost instant communication with such internet sites as Facebook, twitter and YouTube great distress and bully can occur before a site is taken down.  Misinformation can be spread (in the form of pictures and/or words) and spread extremely quickly, so much so it is almost unstoppable.

Exercise 20: Improvement or interpretation?

This exercise is to show how you can alter an image with the object to improve it or even make it totally different from the original one.  The image in question is one where I can enhance the eyes of a person to make them stand out.  As the eyes are ‘a window to the soul’ this could be quite an emotive subject.  It’s not known who wrote the words but according to Google it may have been written by an Arab of ancient times or from the Old Testament version of the bible. But, no one really knows.  Of course, the meaning of the words is that by looking into the eyes of a person one can see their hidden emotions and attitudes and thoughts.

I started this exercise by working on one eye at a time. I used my faithful book ‘How to cheat in Photoshop’ using the exercise which illustrates this feature.  As I mentioned in my Exhibitions & Reviews blog, there is a later version of this book, but this suits me just fine.

The object of this exercise was to select an area of a person and ‘improve’ it!  As the exercise itself states in the old days of ‘wet film’ and ‘dodging and burning ‘ it was thought of as quite legitimate.  The exercise asks what limits I would accept as a legitimate adjustment.  If I was taking pictures for a person who asked for some adjustment as they felt their pictures could be improved then I would do minor work. If it was for a well-known, local or national figure, and I was working for myself then I would have to give it serious consideration as to how much change my conscience would allow.  Minor items such as spots, scars and blemishes would be acceptable, but as I wrote in my Reviews blog, major changes would not be acceptable.


Refining exercise

Original image

The subject I chose was a young girl who wanted a photo book to get into modelling.  I felt that her eyes in the picture she had chosen to email to the major agencies could do with a bit of help.

I started with her right eye as it was a bit red around the edges and used the elliptical lasso tool to copy the pupil and created another layer (Ctrl+J) to paste it in and then hid it in the layers palette.  

Normally I would use the Lasso or Magnetic Lasso tool to select the white of the eye but in the ‘Cheat’ book it suggests you use the Bézier tool to select it with as few points as possible and then turn it into selection by pressing Ctrl+Enter.

Grey shading added and blurred

I added shading around the edge of the eyeball using the Burn tool with a low opacity and built it up gradually to make it look normal.  The image here looks a bit gruesome but it all comes good in the end.

Then I softened the edges using the Blur tool.  Once I had achieved a fairly natural look I switched on the pupil layer and positioned it in between the eyelids and adjusted the position to recreate the previous look.

Eyes bright and whitened

I did exactly the same to her left eye and positioned the pupil to match.  The ‘Cheat’ manual took it a bit further and explained how to make the eye look real by changing the layer mode from Normal to Multiply so that the shading we applied showed through onto the pupil to complete the effect. 
If you group the eyeballs together (or link the layers in the Layers palette) you could move them to look the same way.

Exercise 19: Correction

Correction

Dust Correction

I used the image available on Key Resources for this exercise and I found it fairly easy to remove those bits that I thought were dust motes.  What was more difficult was whether was this a speck of dust or not rather than answer an ethical question as to whether I should remove it or not?  If it enhances the image without changing it too much from the original then, yes, I would make those changes.

Dust removal start

Dust removal finish

I feel that I've been rather simplistic with my glib answer about removing dust from the picture.  I know it's only dust in this instance but it could be something much more important at another time. Later on in this project I remove a whole child from a picture (I've read through the whole project and identified which of my images I can use where) and this leads into far more complicated areas.  I remember last year reading in The Guardian that Grazia magazine had digitally altering a controversial cover picture of the Duchess of Cambridge in her wedding dress.  The magazine had wanted a picture of Kate on her own so had removed Prince William and copied her right arm and replaced it as her left, 'inadvertantly' slimming down her waist as they did so. 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/aug/11/grazia-admits-digital-slimming-royal-duchess 

The Duchess of Cambridge was not the first to have her image electronically enhanced for a glossy magazine cover.  Kate Winslet, an actor renowned for celebrating a normal figure fell victim to the airbrush on more than one occasion. In 2003, the editor of GQ admitted digitally lengthening and slimming her legs for a raunchy cover shoot in which she posed in a basque and high heels. Winslet protested that she "was pretty proud of how my legs actually looked in the real picture".

So, from small beginnings, greater deceptions happen, where does it all end.

Lens Flare Correction

I found the flare harder to remove satisfactorily as there wasn't that much to grab from to replace the pixels.  It was harder than the dust removel as I had to use the clone tool rather than the spot healing brush.  Again, if you are not trying to conceal something illegal, then I find nothing wrong it improving the image.  At one time Scenes of Crime officers had to produce their rolls of film in court when giving evidence to prove that they had not been tampered with.  How they manage now it is hard to imagine when corrections can be done with the click of a mouse?

Lens flare start

Lens flare finish

I feel there are times when cloning is allowable, but when something is misrepresented by images that have been Photoshop'd then my answer is no, it's not ethical.

Want to get on with it!

I'm really excited about this part of the module as I have long been a practitioner of Photoshop and have kept up to date with each new update. I can't wait to get started. so here goes.