Photoshop Backcover Image 2

The second aspect of my back cover was the an image which I had worked with closely throughout the assignment in two different terms. The main image itself was originally part of my main image design for the front cover however after going a different route with this I decided to use the image else where as it was of good quality but also appealing. The idea from this image came from a simple tutorial I found online, the idea was to create an image with fireworks in the background. In my case this image would be the Eiffel Tower. I ended up combining three different images for this final piece. The images, their sources and date of access can be seen below.

Sourced: http://www.anderson-tours.co.uk/top-10-things-to-do-in-paris/ Accessed: 06/02/2014

 

Sourced: http://localtvstlmoms.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/fireworks-safety.jpg Accessed: 24/02/2014

 

Sourced: http://wakpaper.com/large/Sky_wallpapers_59.jpg Accessed 24/02/2014

 

 

So as mentioned above I really liked the image of the Eiffel Tower and wanted to incorporate it into my final inlay however I wasn't originally 100% sure how I would do this. To create my final image I used the Eiffel Tower image as the basis however I cut out the sky and replaced it with the image of the sky seen above. This image was then edited to make it look like an early evening/night scene. I then cut out and incorporated the fireworks into the background and added a range of effects to create the desired atmosphere. (The steps to follow explain exactly how this was achieved and why).

 

 

Like the airbrushed image in the previous blog post I used a mixture of resources in order to achieve the desired look. In order to insert the fireworks to my image and change the background of one of the images I used these tutorials:

http://www.photoshopessentials.com/photo-effects/fireworks/. This was very simple and didn't give off the right effect with the simple Eiffel Tower image and hence I changed the background of this. I used a second tutorial to achieve this and the link is as follows: http://www.photoshopessentials.com/photo-editing/replace-sky/.

It would seem silly to repeat all of these process which I have already spoken about in previous posts and for this reason you should see Photoshop - Self Taught Tutorial 3 and 5. These show the main principles behind what I did to change the background of my Eiffel Tower image to the sky in the above image and the add the fireworks to this combination. The screenshot below shows the image once I had simply combined all three images.

The main issue that I had once I had combined all of these images where the general effect. The image looked like a sunny day and when do you let off fireworks in daylight? For this reason I needed to add effects to the image to make it look like an evening picture.

I ended up using so many effects and filters to achieve the look I wanted for this image so I will start with the basic effects/adjustments and then work up to those that made the most difference. In order to create the right basis for my combined images I added a brightness/contrast effect on the main Eiffel Tower image. This darkened the image slightly while not making a massive effect overall. I then added a brightness/contrast effect to the new image as a whole rather than a separate layer. This made a considerable different to my image and it now looked a lot more like an evening shot. The screenshot below shows the new image after these two simple effects.

 

You can immediately see the difference this contrast has made. My next train of thought led me to feel that the sky was still slightly too vibrant for a night time image while the ground below the Eiffel Tower still looked really orange/red which now didn't work with the sky. These where the next two things I aimed to change. To make my image look more realistically dark I decided to add Curves. These change the level of lightness in the picture. The Curves graph has a centre line. This is the optimum light for a general image. I pulled this curve lightly below the line in order to make my image slightly darker. The result of this and the curve graph can be seen in the below screenshot.

 

 

 





The next stage of editing this image was to remove the orange tint to the lower half of my image. To do this I used the colour balance tool. This was very difficult as it was hard to completely remove all of the tint. I changed the level of blue in the image to higher than the levels of red and green.  I lowered the level of reds and the combination of these made the lower half of my image look darker and more 'normal' while it made the upper half of my image more realistic and slightly darker. The Red was -29, the Green - +6 while the blue was +25. The screenshot below shows the image with the colour balance to the right.

 

The next effect I used was to add a vibrancy. This was a very simple tool I used and it simply made the top of my image slightly darker. I changed the vibrancy setting to +27 and the Saturation to -11. The screenshot below shows the image so far with the vibrancy scale to the right.

 

 The final effect I added was Levels. When I first started this assignment I was unsure how these would fit into my images however they create really professional effects and edit the lighting in images perfectly. Like all of the other effects I have used the Levels darken the image. I moved the sliders on the graph to bring the white closer to the black. This darkens the image. The screenshot below shows this effect with the graph to the right with the Levels I have altered.

 

 So now if we look at my image as a whole we can see how all of these above effects gradually made my image darker and more like a night time picture.

 

After looking at this image I decided that I wanted to play around with a slightly different filter. I decided to add a wind filter. This would make the image look more realistic. To achieve this I simply went to the Filters menu, then Stylize and finally Wind. I then adjusted the settings to Wind and From The Right. This will give a filter which makes the image look like its a windy day with the wind blowing from the right. The settings I used can be seen in the below screenshot.

This was the final stage within this image. The image below shows the final image which is now ready to embed on my DVD template.

 



 

 

 

 

What key tools where used in this process:

Layers

Levels

Layer Masks

Brightness/Contrast

Vibrancy

Colour Balance 

Stylize Filter

Curves

Layer Transparency

Magnetic Lasso Tool

 

Like in my previous blog post regarding my Spine creation I will also evaluate the effectiveness of this aspect in terms of my inlay as a whole rather than an individual piece and hence this is to follow at a later date.