Hand Colouring Using Blending Techniques

My task was to change this colour into black and white then to add colour using the blending tools and a brush.

In order to do this I made a new layer then used the hue/saturation pallet to remove all the saturation from the image making it black and white.

Each layer I created I had to change it so that it blended the colours of the new layer and the layers beneath it. Every time I added a new colour i made it on a new level this made it eaier for me to check if the new colour I had just added look right with the rest of the image.

The colours I decided to add where the green to the grass as I felt that it stoof out in that part of the image and would make a good starting place for my editing. The reflection of the houses in the water I decided to make even more grey then they were on the original as i felt this subtle effect would add to the feel of this image. Finally I decided to ass a few colours to the house in the middle as it acts as a focal point in my image as the river and the grass both lead towards it and also in a way border it. This makes the house grab your attention eventhough the colours added to it are very subtle and very faint.

David LaChapelle

David LaChapelle was born March 11th 1963 in farefield Connecticut. He is a photographer and a video director, he works in the fields of fashion, music and art he is noted for his surreal and sometimes humorous style.

He has recieved many awards for his works ranging from ''Best new photographer of the year'' in 1995 to ''GLAADs Vito Russo Award for outstanding contributions for fighting against homophobia''. He has also had four books published these books are all of the photographs that he has taken. All four books contain vivid sureal images of celebrities.

The picture above is the one he took of Madonna and is featured in one of his books, he often uses editing techniques to improve and transform the look of his pictures in a very major way he will often add things that were never in the picture rather then just changing certain bits or just airbrushing something out.

Colour Warming

Monochrome And Colourized Monochrome

This is the image that I started with I used this image as it has some sharp lines that I think will stand out well when in negative.

This is the image that I ended up with the way I did this was to change the image into black and white by taking the saturation all the way down. However, before i did that i changed the brightness (o to -5) and contrast (0 to 26). I then had to invert the image so that it came out in negative.

Colourizing A Picture

The task I had to do was to use the colourize tool on photoshop which is in the adjust hue/saturation pallet.

When I did this i had to create more layers in order to do this properly and this also made it much easier to correct after I had made a mistake, as with the selection tools it is often very easy to go over the edges which then means that parts of the image that you don't want to change will end up a different colour.

I decided to use this image as it already had very strong lines that were easy to follow with the selection tool and this also meant that i could create very effective contrast very easily using this very simple tool. I chose to only change two parts of this image as they were very large areas and even though they are very strange colours it doesn't make it look strange or out of place compared to the original as the original was already very perfect and did look as if it had already had some form of image changing work done to it even though it hadn't.

Using Levels

An under-exposed image is an image that does not have enough light, on the histogram this would be shown as a lot on the left and none on the right (as shown above).

An over-exposed image is an image that has too much light, this would look like the opposite of the above histogram.

A correctly exposed image has a well spread distribution of light so will have peaks at both ends of the histogram and should have a larger peak near the grey area of the histogram.

A high key image is on that has predominantly light tones, whereas a low key image will be predominantly dark tones which will make the same picture look very different with each of these different effects added to it.

There are many different ways of selecting things using different tools and all are useful for different things:

• Magic wand - this is used to select a whole area of the same colour within a certain constraint limit which can be set to be more accurate or more indescrete when it selects colours.
• Magnetic laso - this will stick to the edge of the colour that you move it passed which makes it very good for going around the edge of very defined areas that have lots of different colours in them.
• Selection brush - this allows you to manually brush the area you wish to select which makes it easier to select small detailed areas that may have lots of different colours in a small area that the other selection tool may not allow you to get, or would select without you wanting them to.

Using The Levels Pallet

This is the levels pallet, the histogram shows the distribution of red, green and blue throughout the picture. As you can see from this screen shot there is a lot of grey in this picture but there is not many whites, so the image that this levels pallet belongs to is under exposed.

Cropping Tool

This is the image that i started with before i decided to crop it. I had to think about what I wanted to be in the image and the rule of thirds. The rule of thirds is there are two lines draw horizontaly and two lines drawn verticaly these are all equaly spaced and you place important elements along these points of intersection, this draws the eye to these important elements of the image.