A Design A Day

Here is a photograph I took while visiting Coney Island last year:

Step One: Duplicate! Before you begin editing a photo, ALWAYS duplicate the image. This way you can always go back to the original in case you ever change your mind about the way the photo was edited. To duplicate an image, click the Image menu located in the menu bar, scroll down and click “Duplicate.”

Step Two: Crop. I want the seated men and women in the center of the image to be the focal point. However, the boy on the right is very distracting. He is walking into the frame, his motion taking the attention away from the static women. His red t-shirt is the most saturated color in the image, which also diverts our attention towards his direction and away from the more subdued colors of the seated group. So I crop him out. To do this select the crop tool located in photoshop’s (I’m working in CS4) toolbox. The cursor has now become the crop tool, so now you just drag the cursor/crop tool over the desired area you want to KEEP and then press the “return” key on the keyboard. If you don’t like the result, just click on Edit from the menu bar and select the”undo” or the “step backward options.

Step Three: More Cropping. I’m still not satisfied with the basic composition of the photo. Now the group is smack-bang in the middle of the image, making it a somewhat boring compostion. Their body’s are seated in such a way so that they are all pointing to the right-hand side of the page. Since the energy is being directed to the right-hand side, I want to keep as much space as possible on this side. This keeps the flow of the page. So I crop out the empty space on the left hand side of the page. I crop out the fence at the top, as I find it distracting and unnecessary. I also crop the bottom off the wooden deck, so that it cuts the right hand side of the page at roughly a third.

Step Four: Color Editing. This photo has slightly subdued colors and I think it would look much better if these were intensified a little bit. Instead of just increasing the saturation, another way of achieving this effect is to click on Image, select “Mode” and then select “Lab color.” Once the photo is in Lab color, click on Image again, select “Adjustments” and then select “Curves.” The curves window will appear, which has three channels you can adjust; the Lightness of the image, channel a, which adjusts the colors red and green, and channel b, which adjusts the colors blue and yellow. To adjust a particular channel, first select the channel, and then click one of the little sliderss that cap each end of the line. By dragging the sliders you will be changing the lightness or color of the image. For this image I adjusted the both sliders in the Lightness channel by a value of five. For the a and b channels I adjusted every slider by a value of 6. Now the image has more depth.

Step Five: Adding More Depth. Adjusting the colors gave the image depth, but to give it even more, one can use the burn tool. The burn tool is located in the toolbox, however it’s hidden under the dodge tool. You can select the burn tool by clicking on the arrow that appears in the bottom right hand corner of the dodge tool. Once selected, the dodge tool appears as a circle. The size of this circle can be enlarged by pressing the ] key, and decreased by pressing the [ key. You can also change the opacity of the dodge tool by increasing or decreasing the strength of the exposure. This is done by clicking on the exposure box (found below the menu bar, in the bar that appeared when the dodge tool was selected) and moving the slider to the right or left. For this image I set the exposure at 3%, so that the photo doesn’t appear to have been altered. With a large brush I stroked each edge of the canvas to create a frame. Now the image is complete!