Final Blog Post

Well the school semester has come to an end, which means it is the end of my project...or is it?

This years passion project I enjoyed doing quite a lot. Learning how to use photoshop was really fun and was really intersting for me. Being able to learn how to accomplish different techniques on photoshop that I have always been curious how to do was awesome for me, and I know that even though this project is over, I am still going to continue to do it. I have learned that taking pictures and taking the time to edit things is something I really enjoy doing. I loved being able to take portraits of people and having them love the finished product. It was a really good feeling, and I loved being able to share my pictures with other people.

My plans for this project had been originally to learn how to use photoshop, and to continue my project from last year by taking different types of photography. By the end of this project I feel like I did my plan quite successfully. One thing I didn't do was take different styles of photography... all my pictures ended up being portraits. Personally I am not disappointed by this because I really do love taking portraits and I am really happy how they all turned out. I learned a lot on photoshop, and I got the opportunity to get out and take some more pictures of my friends and my sister and I had a lot of fun doing that. My final goal was to have 15 edited pictures by the end of the semester. I only ended up having 8, but I am not bothered by the fact that I did not get 15 because I really accomplished the original goal by learning a lot on photoshop, so I am really proud how my project ended.

So applying my passion project to bible class is quite easy with the biblical through lines! This year I chose 3 through lines. My first one was beauty creating. Beauty creating is referring to the fact that God is the creator who has made everything, and while we are creating something we are reflecting on him. When I edit pictures I am enhancing the photo to look even better. I think when I'm doing this it makes Gods work look even better. It is eye opening to me to see the things that God created and that I created and be happy with both. My other through line was creation enjoying. This through line is one of the most easiest through lines for my passion project. God has created everything so beautifully and wants us to enjoy it. For my project I am constantly doing this. When I take pictures of natures, or portraits or even my sister playing sports I can reflect on everything God has made, and it's amazing for me to be able see all that he has created. The last through line I chose was community building. This project I got to work with a lot of different people and I had so much fun doing it! I got to know Felicity, who really helped me in this project with learning all about photoshop, and I got to work with Taylor a lot when we went on photo shoots together and I got to hangout with Miranda lot because as you can see when you look through my blog, she was my main model for this project. God has made us so that we are to be able to help each other and live in community together and I really felt like I was able to accomplish this in this project.

For this project I used Felicity as my mentor. Felicity was the obvious choice for me because she was posting pictures on Instagram and flickr of edits that I really wanted to learn how to do. We ended up having a lot of fun together and I learned a lot from her. So a big shout out to Felicity, thank you su much for all your help in this project! My other main resource was youtube and blog posts similar to my own. I used a lot of self discovery in this project and enjoyed doing. Check out my resource page for all the sites I used throughout this project! Also you should check out my mentors blog, she has some great stuff! My Mentors Bog

So this is the end to my project! I hope that by looking through my blog posts you could learn something about photography through my learning experiences. Thanks for reading!

Also if you are interested in seeing more of my pictures, check out my flickr account! My flickr AccountI'm hoping to get more viewers, commenters and likes on flickr as I started sharing more of my work.

Working with Portraits

Tool Box

With the portraits that I had taken during my photo shoot with Taylor, Miranda and Felicity I learned how to do several different things on photoshop that helps make your portraits stand out more.

Brightening Teeth

To do whiten teeth you need use different tools on the tool box. I have the ones that I used circled in different colours to give you an idea of what each tool looks like.

Step One & Two

Step One: First zoom into your subject's teeth with the zoom tool. (Circled in green on toolbox.) This helps you see the colour of the teeth better, and allows you to get a better idea of what you are changing. Then you grab the lasso tool (circled in red on toolbox), and you draw around the teeth. It doesn't have to be perfectly outlined, so you can do this step very quickly.

Step Two: On your layer palette, select the Hue/Saturation option. After you do this a Hue and Saturation bar opens up.

Steps 3 & 4

Step Three: By the option that says Edit it is set to the option Master. Click on the arrows and select the Yellow option.

Step Four: After you turn the edit option to yellow, take the saturation bar and drag it all the way down. As you do this, you can look at the teeth you are editing and you can see that you took the yellow in your subjects teeth completely away!

Step Five & Six

Step Five: Now that you have taken the yellow out of your subjects teeth, you might as well brighten them . Go back to the edit option, click on the arrows and select the master option.

Step Six: After you switched the edit option to master, bring up the lightness a little. Do not turn it uo really high because you do not want your subject's teeth to look unnaturally white. If you watch the teeth while you adjust the lightness you see that the whole area that you had lassoed lightens up. Don't worry about that, it is suppose to happen! There is a few more steps that will take that right out!

Step Eight

Step Seven: Go to your toolbox again and look at your foreground and background setting. (Circled in purple on toolbox) Make sure that the foreground tool is set to black. If its not, just click on that box and a tab with colours pop up and you can easily just select the colour black.

Step Eight: Then go to the top of your screen and select Edit and then the Fill option. After you do this a fill box pops up. All you have to do is click on the arrows by the Use option, and select the Black option. This will fill in the lightened spot on your image, which makes your teeth go back to yellow again.

Step Nine: To get your teeth white and shiny again, grab the paintbrush tool (circled in yellow on toolbox) and paint your teeth. This will make the white and shiny again. (On picture labeled Step Nine, I painted the left side of miranda's mouth so you can see what the paint brush does if you compare it to the right side of her mouth.) And that is all you have to do!

Step Nine

Before and After shots of Miranda's brightly new teeth.

Brighting eyes:

Tool Box

I really wanted to learn how to brighten eyes in portraits to get that wow look. Unfortunately the result was not very exciting, because in all my portraits people either have their eyes closed, or their eye is shadowed by their hair so one eye is darker then the other, which makes it hard to brighten them because they look like two different shades of eye colours. I still think the way to do it is neat, and next time I take a portrait I will make sure my subjects eye is shown clearly, and I will try to brighten it with photoshop.

Step One & Step Two. Before and After shots of colouring
the white part of Miranda's eyes. 

Step One: Zoom into your subjects eyes with the zoom tool. (Circled in red on the tool bar.) Then select the dodge tool. (Circled in purple on the tool bar.)

Step Three. Before and After shots of Miranda's brightened eye. 

Step Two: Once you've selected the dodge tool, the settings at the top left hand of the screen change. The settings you will be changing will be the brush size, and the exposure. First change your exposure to something low, like 12%. The take your dodge tool and colour the white part of your subjects eye. Change your brush size to a size that fits the white areas of the eyes.



Step Three: After you have coloured the white parts of the eye, change your exposure to something higher. I changed mine to 25% but you can go higher. Then colour the colour part of the eye, not including the pupil. And viola! Your subjects eyes are much brighter.



Fun fact! If you ignore the tutorials advice and don't change your exposure to a lower setting, you are going to make your subjects eyes VERY bright... which is as you can see by Miranda's eye is not a very flattering look! So do not forget to change you exposure settings like I did, otherwise you could get very alarming eye results.

Here are the before and after pictures of my edit to Miranda's eyes. If you get a close look you can see that her eyes are a bit bluer. I am hoping the next portrait i take will have a close up of someones eyes so you can see a more clearer difference.

Blurring the Background of a Picture:
Another thing I've really been wanting to learn is how to blur  the background in pictures. So I took another portrait of Miranda and figured it out! (With youtube's help of course)



Step One: On the layers palette you see a tiny image of the picture that you have opened in photoshop titled  "Background". This is the background layer, everything you will change to your picture will change also on this layer. To blur the background you need to duplicate the layer. To do this, you left click on the background layer.

Step Two: after you left click on the mouse, some options will pop up. you need to select duplicate Layer. this means that anything you change to the picture will be put on the background layer AND this layer. If you were to delete this layer however, the changes that have been made will be deleted from the background layer as.

Step Three: If you have two tiny pictures of you image, you have completed step two correctly. Make sure to be on the background copy layer when doing the next few steps.

Step four: Go to the top of your screen and select the filter option. Then go down to Blur, and then to Gaussian Blur.

Step five: A Gaussian Bar will pop. In the pixels box you type in a number that will control how blurry your image is. the higher the pixels you type in, the more blurrier of a image you will get. After you hit okay, your whole image will be blurry, even your subject.

Step six: To get your subject back into focus you take the eraser tool on the tool box, and start erasing over your subject. You are erasing the blur away, and getting your in focus subject back! As you can see on this picture of Miranda, I started erasing her face making her face look in focus once again.

Before and After!

Here are a list of the links I used to learn about these edits:
http://youtu.be/uDcepzxGb98

Film Effect Using Curves

Recently I had the chance of going on another photo shoot to get some pictures for my passion project. I went with my friends Taylor Vaags, Miranda Vlaming (the two girls I used in my last shoot)  and Felicity Pollard, who I have mentioned before in my blog. Having Felicity come along which was really nice because she was very helpful, and gave a few key points while we took pictures. Unfortunately the day was not as successful as we had planned... It was very cold and we were all very miserable. I only ended up getting few good pictures, which was a little disappointing. But thankfully, with the few pictures I got, I was able to learn many different things on photoshop which I am very excited about! So taking pictures in the cold ended up being worth it :)

One thing that I have really wanted to learn how to do on photoshop was trying to make my pictures have this cool effect that a lot of pictures that I have seen, seem to have. I was not sure what the exact type of editing it was, so I talked to Felicity because a lot of her pictures had the look I was wanting. She told me that the look is called the Film Effect. It is a very common type of edit now a days, and you get this kind of edit  by using curves on photoshop. 

I tried looking at different youtube tutorials, but I could not find one that really helped me understand how to get the right effect. I was looking at tutorials that were talking about a matte effect that had a similar look to the film effect, but I was not satisfied how my pictures looked after trying the different things the tutorials suggested to do on photoshop. I used a picture that I took of my sister back in the fall to try to experiment with curves. I had different trial runs, and was not really happy with any of them. 

Since I was having no luck with finding film effect tutorials on youtube, I thought I would try to search it up on my pinterest. I often use pinterest for photo inspiration, ideas, or I use the photoshop tutorials I find on it. Pinterest has many photos that I love, and that have the exact look I was looking for, so I thought I'd give it a try. I was very successful when I did this! After looking through different Pinterest posts on film effects, I found one that explained how to do it very clearly! From that post I successfully edited my first film effect edit. (Check out pictures at the end of this blog post) 

This is how I managed to get the film effect. You open up curves on photoshop, and you need to do these two key things to get this certain look.

Step One: The left bottom corner you need to take the curves line and move it up. This increases the brightness in the dark areas of the picture.

Step Two: Move it to the right which reduces the detail in the picture.

Something that was also suggested to do on the blog post that I used, was yo take the top right corner curve line and move it down and move it to the left to "crush the white", as said in the blog.

Another thing that I found to make the picture pop more is to take the middle of the curve line and pull it up. This boosts the contrast of the picture, giving it a brighter look. 

I was really excited when I figured this out! Not only had I finally got the look I was looking for, but it was also super easy! 

I tried doing it on different pictures and loved the results. As I practiced more with curves, I ended up really enjoying using it and feel more confident when I use it that I know what I am doing which I am very excited about. 

One another thing I found out is to get more of a film effect you should make more curve layers. This will put a new curve layer on top of another layer and gives your picture a even cooler look. 

Here are the before and after of my film effect pictures:

This is the link to the blog that helped me learn about the film effect: Film Effect