Design Ideas and Design Process

For this task, I wanted to solely remove people from images. I wanted to get a feel of home, so wanted to retouch images of Cornish beaches. The image above is the final result from St Ives (a notoriously busy holiday spot). Often, my family will hand me photos to edit so this task was useful for me as it was a highly transferrable skill that I can use in my day-to-day life. I started by gathering my royalty-free images from UnSplash here are the before pictures below.

As a whole, the design process was quite straightforward once I had my images and had watched some tutorials. The general process for each image was to use the spot blemish tool to remove people from the images. I started with the St Ives image, this was solely getting rid of the families in the image. Next, I wanted to challenge myself more with the Porthcurno image. For this image I removed the surfers, this was relatively straightforward, although one of the surfers was in an awkward position on the wave which meant playing around. After that, I adjusted the levels and curves in the image, this made the tones stand out more without overexposing the image. I then added a photo filter to tie it together. Lastly, I wanted to use these tools and try some other tools I was not as comfortable with, in particular, the burn tool. I followed the same process as the previous images, removing people, adjusting levels and curves. The Fistral Beach image had a lovely orange tone in the sky which I wanted to stand out more. I experimented with the burn tool to make it stand out more, and make the clouds more prominent. I used the burn tool with large brush size, low density, and decreased opacity. I then used the sharpen tool to make the lone surfer stand out and extenuate the horizon.

 

After Retouching

Software Tutorials

The main tutorials I followed were supplied which I will link at the end of this section. I found most of these tutorials useful and relevant to my task. They helped me develop my skills by using the spot blemish tool, dodge and burn tool, sharpen tool, and so on. I used some of my own knowledge to adjust levels and curves. The tutorials gave me the confidence to apply these skills within my work. The additional link below was a useful gateway to other tutorials, this gave a wider insight into retouching images, more to do with modeling i.e. removing a blemish and evening skin tone, or changing eye or hair colour. I would like to venture and try out these skills despite having a stance on retouching faces and bodies due to the harm it causes. That being said, it would be interesting to have a better understanding of the software and how to use it for other purposes.

https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/how-to/photo-retouching-basics.html

https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/how-to/crop-straighten-to-improve-composition.html

https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/retouching-repairing-images.html

https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/how-to/clone-stamp-remove-object.html

https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/content-aware-patch-move.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hg1WS_yOcHMhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_A5XZPnzOP0

https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/how-to/replace-background.html

https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/how-to/photoshop-sharpen-photos.html

additional:

https://www.photoshopessentials.com/photo-editing/

Design Resources and Articles

These articles and resources were useful with the wider knowledge that was included. The second link is a gateway to more articles and resources for tips etc. This was the most useful additional resource that I found. The adobe link helped me with my designs as it showed the fundamentals that I needed to get started.

https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/how-to/photo-editor.html

https://fstoppers.com/category/photoshop

Learning Across the Module

Across the module, I feel a lot more confident in using the software. I feel that I can confidently format text and utilise paragraph styles, which was my area of improvement in Autumn Term. Specifically, retouching images using particular tools is something I am now very confident in. I enjoyed creating the letter logo in Illustrator as this was one of the areas I missed in TY1DP1, it gave me the opportunity to edit letterforms in Illustrator which isn’t something I have tried before. I could improve on my time management skills and idea generation, however, I do feel that I have improved marginally from Autumn term.