Digital Image Black and White

As part of our course we study digital image. our task this term was split into two sections. But for now I just want to talk about the first task at hand. we were given the challenge in groups to create a beauty advertisement for our own chosen product. this sounds simple enough but the real task was not just taking a pretty picture but to look specifically at black and white photography and dramatic lighting.

Fortunately for us we are given amazing support and I have learnt a lot about lighting in the build up to the actual photo shoot with our photography teacher Chris. Within my group of three with Daniella and lily we first chose our roles within the group, Daniella was a clear choice for our photographer and lily the model which gave me the role of runner/ make-up artist. for a lot of people this would be the duff role but for me i actually revel in the chance to play a little bit of a role in every element.

the product we chose was lime crime white eyeliner. we chose this together as in black and white there isn't a lot of opportunity to show beauty products other than mascara eyeliner or hair products. to gain an edge on the other groups we thought it would be best not to use a black eyeliner as it doesn't stand out in a photo as any thing spectacular.

from here we looked at the style of previous lime crime advertisements and their style of photography and poses. comparing this to research we had done on dramatic lighting and we all had a rough idea of what the composition should look like, as well as factoring in negative space for our own writing.

after this process it was time to get behind the camera, and after thinking we had covered all bases we realised that actually it is far easier to create an image in your head than it is with a camera in real life. we had an issue with creating the lighting we wanted and later realised this was because our model (lily) had a very different complexion to the women we were trying to mimic with lighting. after this blip i am really proud of the imagery we created.

I chose this picture....

now time to edit.
In camera raw format I converted the image to grey scale. From here I took the reds in the image and took them from a minus nine to plus eighty this made her red section of the hair much brighter and lighter. i did this as i think it makes the image more dramatic and give more of a refined look.
i then went to sharpen the image. the image is already very well focused this allows me to sharpen it more than i would usually be able to.
i then continued in photoshop where i created a new blank file which is in format a4. in order to get my desired composition i played with the sizing and position by dragging the image on top of the file.
after playing around for a while i realised that moving lily to the other side of the blank file i could avoid any of her face falling into the gutter and i could make the image larger scale so you can see the product thats being advertised far more clearly.
my new problem is that by doing this you can see the background layer on the right hand side where my image ends. of course for any artist to every problem there is a solution... its just finding it.


I then selected the background and used the brush tool to paint over the white. I enlarged the brush tool a lot to make this a faster process. I repeatedly used alt on top of the image to select the correct colours in relevance to the back ground. add noise filter to create grain. I would then merge the back ground and the image together by flattening the image so i can blend together the previous background and the image as one. then i used brush tool too merger colure more
then used clone stamp to help remove the edge previously between the background layer and image layer, that is still slightly visible.

when zooming out on the image I had got rid of the harsh line but now instead had created small blemishes on the background by using a brush size too small, to solve this I enlarged the brush tool again and smoothed over the area of issue. after zooming in to correct my mistakes I then decided to look at the image as a whole and although there is still darker and lighter patches in the corner I actually like this and decided not to correct it any more as i felt it gave the image a more artistic feel and actually applied more to lime crime as a brand then perhaps a clean monotone grey background would have.

I THEN SAVED MY WORK A THOUSAND TIMES BECAUSE I WOULD CRY FOR A WEEK IF I LOST IT.

for the retouching I have only used two tools the brush tool and healing brush tool... there seems to be a bit of a pattern here. I then zoomed in a ridiculous amount until I can literally see her pours and took the healing brush tool on the smallest section just to remove small blemishes and smooth the skin without loosing the texture. I then did this all over the face on low opacity with the brush tool to smooth over the complexion overall. on the nose specifically I did this low opacity in the same place, clicking once to get the colour and clicking again in exactly the same place to remove any slight dark specs, naturally.

to make the white eyeliner pop more i used the dodge tool. This tool was made apparent to me from my partner Daniella as she saw me struggling with the brush tool. i made the tool very small to concentrate on such a precise area and practically re-did her flicks on the computer. this defiantly improved the image and made it far clearer what it was actually advertising.

final touches....
and finally just to enhance my contest in the picture with dramatic lighting bait more i used the curve to add more shadow.

soooo here it is