Digital Photography and Imaging

Digital Photography and Imaging - Week 6

- July 09, 2023

11.05.2023 (Week 6)
Vanessa Kei Kurniadi / 0360525 / Bachelor or Design in Creative Media
Digital Photography and Imaging
Week 6 - Photo Manipulation

LECTURES

For week 6 Mr Fauzi explained to us the details on our design poster, which is also the Maybank 2023 contest. It was a photo imaging contest that goes around the theme of 12 of the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Group goals. The deadline for the contest is June 2nd, but the task itself doesn't have a strict deadline, and you don't have to submit it to the contest either.

Mr Fauzi also gave us a google docs of the principles of a poster design to help us work on it.

fig 1.1 A page of the given google docs

TUTORIALS

Mr Fauzi gave us 3 videos on the basics of Photoshop. These tutorials help people who are new to making proper photos and how to do it on a budget.

fig 1.1 Photography basics in 10 minutes

fig 1.2 Creative Product Photography At Home - Beginner To Pro!

fig 1.3 Shooting a Bottle with ONE Continuous Light and a Smartphone

PRACTICAL

The practical session for this week is recoloring black and white images. We do it by giving a color on top of the area we want to color on the picture and set the blending modes to soft light or overlay. We also got the instruction in the docs Mr Fauzi gave us.

fig 2.1 Instruction on how to recolour B&W images

I tried to use a color similar to the one on the example, but I'm just not happy with it. At least for me, the guy looks like a white person, so I try to give him light-coloured skin. The blending modes made a drastic change on the saturation so I had to change the skin colour numerous of times until I find a colour I'm quite happy with. The same goes with the eyes, shirt and hair, but since hair and shirt colour are much more flexible, I didn't do as much tweaking into them.

Here's what I made:

fig 2.2 Screenshot of my work

I feel like using this technique to colour an image makes them lose a lot of saturation from the original colour, but with the right tweaking, I guess we can still make it close to expectation.

Here's the final look:

fig 2.3 Instruction on how to recolor B&W images

For the second task I still need to do another image, but this time, with more attention to small details.

On the second task the hair are much more unruly, and the fur coat will also make it harder to colour, so Mr Fauzi introduced us to the masking technique. A tool in Photoshop helped us to block hair details so we don't have to do it manually (thank goodness for that)

We also need to pick the colour of the hair and the skin color from the reference, giving an additional step to the process.

I thought it would be much harder, but no, it's not that hard. It just gives an extra step with the eye-dropping tool and the masking, but the fundamental of the process is still the same. What's more is since a (I assume) Korean has rather pale-coloured skin the eyedropped colour fits it just fine. I also found a colour from the reference that I like surprisingly fast.

The hair is a bit trickier since the details are a bit troublesome. But thanks to the masking tool, it's much faster and simpler to do.

Here's how it looks: