Photoshop - Main Image Stage 3

Now stage two of my main image has been complete it was time to start on my final stage. This stage was creating the background. The background I feel is the most important piece of this main image as it is the largest and hence most scene. Due to the colour used it is also very prominent and hence it had to be of a high quality. The image below shows my final background.

 



For this aspect of my assignment I only used the one image. The image, its source and the date accessed can be seen below.



 

Sourced: http://wakpaper.com/large/Sky_wallpapers_59.jpg Accessed: 20/02/2014

 

 

 This feature was slightly different from the other aspects of my main image as I didn't want to remove anything from this picture but I did however want to crop it. To achieve this I simply opened the image into Photoshop. I then used the crop tool which can be located in the tool bar down the left hand side of the screen. I then used the icons in each corner of the screen to remove access image. You can see the different from my final image to the image I started with above. You can see how I have only used a segment of the image.

 

Now I had the right aspect of my image I wanted to change the colour. To keep in line with my girly theme I went for a pink. To achieve this I used the Hue/Saturation Tool. This can be found in the adjustments panel to the right of the screen. I changed Hue settings to a pinky colour and then changed the Saturation to +71. This determined how bright the pink was. The screenshot below shows the settings for this.

 

 

The image below shows the sky now pink due to the effect I added.

 

From this image you can see the variations in colour, this is based on the light and dark patches in the original blue image. The only area where I find this a big issue is at the top of the image. This is so much darker than the rest of the image and looks out of place for this reason. To get around this issue I added a gradient.

 

To achieve this look I used the Gradient Tool, this can be found in the Tool Panel town the left hand side of the screen. Along the top of the screen a bar then appears with various gradient settings. I adjusted the settings to suit my image. I don't wish to repeat myself and hence the full method of this process can be found in the Second Self Taught Tutorial. The image below shows my sky image now with a gradient to cover the intense top half of the image.

 

As you can see the image as a whole now looks a lot more subtle which is good however I would like to make this slightly more vibrant and also try to reduce the contrast at the top of the image in order to stand out. In order to do this I added a mixture of effects.

 

The first effect I added was the Brightness/Contrast Effect. This can be found in the Adjustments panel to the right of the screen. With this effect I reduced the Contrast but increased the Brightness. This made my image overall paler but also a lot more evenly toned. The screenshot below shows the exact settings I used.

 

With this in mind the image below now shows my sky image up to this stage.

 



The next effect I added was Levels. These were a specific part of my criteria for this project and although I had used them on the back cover I thought it would be a good idea to use them on the main image as well. Like the other effects Levels can be found in the Adjustments panel to the right of the screen. The screenshot below shows the exact settings I used to create my effect.

When I applied this to my image I produced the below product.

As you can see the Levels have brightened up the image without pulling the high contrast area out too much. This brings me onto my next effect. This was Curves. These can also be found in the Adjustments panel to the right of the screen. I used Curves to increase the brightness of the image in a subtle way. Curves give me great control over this due to its graph like nature. The screenshot below shows the exact settings I used in this image and the image below that shows this effect applied.

The last effect I applied to my image was exposure. This is also an effect which can be found in the Adjustments panel to the right of the screen. The reason behind using exposure was to level out all of the effects in my image. I wanted to add an effect which evenly brightened the whole image including all the effects I had added. The screenshot below shows the exact exposure settings I used and the effect this had on my final image.

 

This was the final stage in the creation of this aspect.

 

What key tools where used in this process:

Layers

Layer Masks

Layer Transparencies

Hue/Saturation

Brightness/Contrast

Levels

Curves

Exposure

Gradient

 

Like in my previous blog post regarding the back cover image creations 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.