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?

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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.