Before

After

Image Manipulation/Editing

As you can see in this image, the biggest changes were on Holly. Using Photoshop I re-texturized her skin to appear smoother and clear from her skin condition. To then counter the more mono-toned appearance, especially on her arm and face I artificially shaded and coloured all the skin tones to create the appearance of an artificial light supposedly from the camera that created new key lighting on Holly’s face indentations and shoulder. I also created some artificial small highlights on the side of Holly’s shaved hair in order to create a more colourful image, reflecting a more colourful personality that would appeal to the audience. With all the re-colouring on Holly her eyes appeared very washed out and so I darkened the tone slightly and created a new shadow to highlight the crevices around her eyes. With Scott I darkened his hair, re-coloured his face and tidied up his beard. The reason his face needed re-colouring is because it looked quite depressing, he looked as if he was lacking too much sleep and living a rough life, not the message I want to give to my audience who idolize these figures. In order to fit the spacious and brighten the mood of the picture I also increased the exposure of the shot in Photoshop and added a very light orange filter to the shot that tinges the white background creating a subtle brighter outlook. The reason a brighter look would be better suited to a cover image is because it should be appealing, generally brighter images are more eye-catching and appealing to look at.

Before After

In this image I cropped and resized it. I added a blue filter from above the field and an orange filter that applied to the grass. I cut the silhouette out so he would not be affected by these and darkened the tone of the character to make him appear more silhouette-like. This makes the image appear more mysterious and stirs up more interest within the reader to investigate the page.

In this picture only 3 major changes were made: a huge increase to the gamma aspect of the image, making the hue greener and slightly more blurring on the background. I exaggerated the colours with the gamma so that the picture became much more vibrant and jumped out at the reader more. It also greatly exaggerates Holly’s highlights in her hair and the shadowing of the image. Harsh shadowing creates bigger contrasts in the image which instigates more attention from the reader as it gives of such an un-natural appearance. The drawing point of this image comes from just how exaggerated the modifications are, the readers will notice that something is different about this picture compared to the cover image and will be drawn the differences piquing their interest in the article.

This picture had both a general edits and specific edits, like the cover image. Generally the hue was made more vibrant and green to emphasize the greenery. The gamma was also increase to exaggerate the shadows and colours further. This gave the leaves more varied colours as well as giving Ben some diversity to the tone of his hair colour; the un-edited hair looked too plain and bland to draw attention.

The specific edits were the achene on Ben’s face, although a small image, with the gamma brought up the achene became much more prominent on his face and I had to air brush Ben’s face to take some colour and attention out of the spots. While I did not want to make my model look unpleasant with a load of achene, it was also important not to make him unreachable for the aspiring readers, and so the model is modestly good looking.

BeforeAfter

Despite being the biggest image in my construct, this picture required the least editing. This was due to two reasons: I spent ages in my photo-shoot organising lighting and positioning and secondly, I wanted to maintain a fairly natural look to the image. I wanted a natural appearance because I had previously increased the gamma so much that the magazine’s colour scheme was starting to appear artificial. The only real change was a small change to the hue to better bring out the orange and green that are important to my magazine’s colour scheme. They also make the picture look brighter and show up more intricate details on Holly such as hair highlights and facial toning. All of these make for a more interesting and active image that suits the magazine better.