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Here’s my image assignment!

As I’ve mentioned before, I have some experience in fixing up photographs with Photoshop:

This is a picture of my friends’ daughter, Baby C, that I took while visiting them over winter break in California. The kid is a born model. Seriously, it’s ridiculous. Anyway, I was taking pictures in terrible light in my typical amateurish fashion, and without Photoshop I wouldn’t have been willing to show the results to anybody, let alone her parents. But now I think she can start building a portfolio. Eat your heart out, Tyra Banks.

The Photoshop work above does not represent any sort of serious departure from the original RAW image. As you can see from above, my adjustments came down to correcting the lighting and making the colors pop. That little girl did the rest of it on her own. In a way then, our assignment this week was a great departure from erasing the dust on my sensor from the picture and making the best of a terrible flash.

This is the first assignment that at times left me feeling quite defeated. I still can’t get the coloring right on my main lady’s face – she looks like someone attacked her with foundation then left her to die, such is the terror in her eyes and skin tone. I tried so many ways to make it look natural and failed quite miserably.

Also, interestingly, I ended up finding a color version of my photograph in a book after I’d started coloring. I detail my response to that discovery and how it influenced my work in my image assignment, but even knowing what the colored photo looked like and striving to emulate it, my picture still ended up looking radically different. If I had been able to make the tones look a bit more naturalistic, I could probably start a whole kurfluffle as to which photograph is correct. Luckily for the history community, I am not that skilled. My coloring of the photo vs. the coloring in the photograph I found presents two radically different meanings, something I’m still thinking about.

I did enjoy the assignment, though as I noted in my narrative, Photoshop is a lot more fun when you are free to meander through  your image manipulation without structure. This was the first time I had guidelines and requirements from outside being imposed upon my work. Actually, interestingly enough, my brother’s girlfriend asked me to take some head shots of her this weekend. It marked the first time I’d ever shot and edited head shots for professional use, and I actually used a lot of the techniques I learned in this class to edit her photos, most helpfully burn and dodge. Being on familiar ground, working with photographs I’ve taken, I felt more comfortable and, in fact, I also felt frustrated because I had too few guidelines to work with for the head shots. I’m still not sure I produced an adequate finished product.

There’s a key lesson: research and ask for help. I spent so long trying to get the vignetting to work and so far I’ve failed miserably to recreate our exercise in class. Now I am going to ask for help! I take solace in knowing that I can create transparent backgrounds without crying most of the time. Now I will stand and and wait for my trial by fire. Well, not wait exactly. I’m sure I’ll change the vignette and my lady’s face about 4 million times between now and then.

That reminds me! One of the greatest skills you’ll ever learn in Photoshop is when to stop and let an image be finished. It’s a lot like writing in that way, actually.

Edit: So far this week I have commented on David’s post.