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Digital Photography and Imaging - Week 4

 

14/10/24 - 20/10/24 / Week 4
Brendan Fedya / 0376283
Digital Photography and Imaging / Bachelor of Design (Hons) in Creative Media

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1.    Lectures

2.    Tutorial

3.    Practical

4.    Reflections

I. LECTURES

➼     Adjustment Layers & Filters

        Adjustment layers are transparent layers that allow you make adjustments to your image. THIS WILL NOT PERMANENTLY ALTER THE ORIGINAL IMAGE DATA. Using this is essential to fine tune our images, and creating complex design works.
There are many types of adjustment layers:

1.    Brightness, (for highlights) / Contrast (for shadows).
Figure 1.1: Brightness/Contrast (18/10/2024).

2.    Levels, for tonal value adjustments (shadows, midtones, highlights.)
Figure 1.2: Levels (18/10/2024).

3.    Curves, advance controls of tonal range.
Figure 1.3: Curves (18/10/2024).

4.    Exposure (Highlights), Offset (midtones), Gamma (dark tones.)
Figure 1.4: Exposure (18/10/2024).

5.    Selective Color, modifies a primary color without affecting the others.
Figure 1.5: Selective colors (18/10/2024).

        Unlike adjustment layers, filters are effects that apply the changes directly into the image. In other words, it alters the pixels to create a certain effect. This is mostly used for efficiency, because it could be adjusted easily just with a single step, not being done manually like with adjustment layers.

Figure 1.6: Filters (18/10/2024).


II. TUTORIAL

        In this week, we were tasked to work with adjustment layers & filters on our best chosen collage by Mr. Fauzi out of 3 digital collages we made.

Tutorial video: 

III. TASK

        For the collage that I will be working on, Mr. Fauzi chose this one:

DESCRIPTION: The concept I used for this collage is emphasizing the typewriter, it acts as the storyteller of the lives of the people below it. It symbolizes unity, even though they are unaware of their unseen connections among them. Despite in the same story, they never even paused to look up and realize that everyone is always connected in some ways.

Figure 3.1: Without adjustment layers & filters (19/10/2024).

Firstly, I used the darken blending mode on the fishes to get a clearer image of the overall design.

Figure 3.2: With blending mode (19/10/2024).

        Then for the adjustment layers, I played on hue/saturation, inversions, brightness/contrast. And the filter that I've chosen is the uniform noise filter. 

Figure 3.3: Work process in Adobe Photoshop (19/10/2024).

        Here's the detailed description I wrote on the Google Classroom submission and the final result:

DESCRIPTION: Since the first time I made this collage, I already planned to reduce the opacity and use darken on the fishes, not to block the view of the people. I didn't plan them to be literal fishes, but they are just going to be effects so it won't be so plain in the lower part. And to highlight the typewriter even more, I increased the saturation to make them more greenish. For the overall design, I want them to be more colorful, so I use the noise filter with colorful grains which enhances its overall aesthetics for me personally. I changed some of the fishes into their inverted colors, giving them a blending effect to create a more natural texture so it would not look very blockish. At last, I added some minor retouches to balance the adjustments I applied before.

➼     FINAL Digital Collage

Figure 3.4: Final digital collage with adjustment layers & filters (19/10/2024).

IV. REFLECTIONS

        During the making of this task, the adjustment layers are very much a challenge. At first, I thought that using adjustment layers is the same like using filters to edit photos in smartphones, but turns out it was much more complex. Too much adjustments will make the collage lose its true nuance, while too little will make it so flat.

    I realized that good organization of the layers is very crucial in this part, doing it without grouping of the layers will result in other layers getting involved in the adjustments without us even realizing it, causing the overall design to be unbalanced (maybe you will make certain parts dominant unintentionally hence making it distracting.)

    Even so, adjustment layers and filters are very important skills to master for us, designers. Because features like these will help us a lot in conveying the true meaning of our own designs.

Your attention is valued, thank you for reading until the end!




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