30.11.09

Late Week 6: My Work



For this week's post, I decided to have a bit of a challenge for myself. I was looking through tutorials about Photoshop, and I happened to stumble across a comment from someone mentioning how hard it is to change black clothing to appear as white clothing. I made it my mission to try this out!

For starters, I didn't have a very high resolution camera to take a picture of myself with, so the above image didn't give me a whole bunch to work with as far as clothing texture. I definitely was trying to retain as much of the proper shadowing as possible, but in the midst of levels, curves, color balance adjustments, dodge tool, burn tool, ect.......I ended up with what looked like glowing gray clothing. ADDITIONALLY, I was so focused and zoomed in on the clothing, that I didn't notice some accidental texture and color changes I had made to my skin. By then it was too late.

I probably should have scrapped this image while I had the chance, and started anew. However, after literally 3 hours of focus on altering just one image, I WAS NOT GOING TO BE A QUITTER! After I got the clothing to look reasonable, I switched gears to my face, applying filter after filter to different parts of my face; film grain helped me look like I had SOME facial texture, and a good scattering of other textures made it look slightly less like I was wearing lipstick.

Maybe this image is just a big fail, but in all I've seen people proudly present much worse on their blogs, facebook, and myspace pages. If anything, I've learned a lot lessons on controlling what I'm working on, so that if certain types of changes need to be made later it isn't impossible.

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