Photo Corrections

Original Image:

Corrected:

This is a picture of my cousins and I at the Jersey Shore. I wanted to correct the original photo as if I someone wanted to frame this as a family picture, but wanted a few corrections done. What I did first was take out the people from the background, and the straight layers of sand, shallows, wave, water, and sky made this pretty straightforward. Then I lightened the shadows to 21% because in the original, the faces were half-hidden in shadow. This took away some of the color of the picture, however, so I saturated the colors by 17% to give it brighter colors, and darkened the picture to -9% because the saturation made it brighter. Although I'm afraid I may have saturated a little too much. When I showed people the corrected imagine alone, however, they thought it looked natural. 

Original:

Corrected:

This was a picture I took offshore one day when hundreds of stinging jellyfish washed up onto the beach. The water was murky, however, so the only way I could get a clear shot was by holding the camera beneath the jellyfish and facing up towards the surface. Many of the pictures came out great, but a few of them, like this one, came out really dark because the sun was behind it. So I tried to correct this one, first by darkening the highlights by 22%, and then lightening the shadows to 42% from 20%. This gave a much clearer picture of the jellyfish's features. It took away from the color, however, so I gave it 21% saturation. This made the picture seem unnaturally bright, so I darkened the image to -13% lightness. To give the tentacles near the sun some definition, I upped the contrast by 8%. I'm not extremely happy with how this picture turned out, but I like how you can see the features of the jellyfish better without it looking too unnatural.

Original:

Corrected:

This is an ancient viking sword from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The original picture came out a bit fuzzy and dim, so I wanted to really bring out the old qualities and markings on the blade, handle, and hilt. I upped the contrast by 36% and upped the brightness to 13%. I tried working with the saturation and some more contrast, but this made the picture look unnatural and at one point even took away some of the details of the picture. I think it's a slightly improved, brighter and sharper image than the original. 

Compositions

For this week's assignment, we were told to create a composition using a "harmonic framework," or a series of lines to create shapes that would harmonize the composition. This was the result:

For this painting I wanted to add a story component to the artwork, so I scanned an old pencil drawing of a Maori sea goddess and modified/painted it on photoshop. I wanted there to be a contrast between the seaweed woman's straight posture and her staff's angle, with the curling tendrils to give a kind of disparity to the rules of straight lines. Here's the framework behind the painting:

The second composition using a "harmonic framework" is a picture I took in Williamsburg, VA of a judge's hands in an old court reenactment, writing with a quill and ink. 

I wanted to create the illusion that the ink was dripping down the old man's hands, down the crevices wrinkles in his fingers and onto the paper. I wanted the focal point of the image to be where his two fingers were grasping the quill, as well as the opposition of the lines formed by the quill and the trail of ink. I used the black pen and a little blur tool for the ink. Below is the framework for the composition: