Assignment- Digital Image Manipulation

For the main assignment we have been asked to show our skills in digital manipulation. For this we have been asked to get four pictures which we have taken ourselves and then show clear evidence of modification on the pictures.

For this task I will be using four images which relate to my Rivers theme and then I will be using different tools to edit them. I will be using a range from background tools to change the background of my pictures to different filters and effects. This is the theme I am choosing for this task.

River Trent Present

This is the first image that I am going to be editing. When I was on a practice shoot when I had just bought my camera I decided to take a few shots of the River Trent with the Trent bridge included in the shot. This was my favourite image from the shoot. In this image I will be adding a different background to the picture to make the picture look like it was taken a very long time ago.

River Trent Ancient

This is the final product of my manipulated image. For this I took a shot of a piece of paper with spilled tea on it, waited for it to dry to give it and ancient looking effect. I then went onto photoshop and loaded both pictures up. I selected my paper picture and moved it onto my picture of the River Trent. I then clicked overlay so the layers then merged together. I did this twice to get a stronger effect. So as you can see by using this method I managed to get a picture from the present day and made it look like a picture from the olden days.

The Underside

This is my second picture that I am going to be editing. This shot was taken by me on the same day that I went out to take some practice shots when I first bought my camera. This picture was taken underneath the Trent bridge from the picture displayed above. For this shot I will be using different filters to create different effects. For example I will be changing the pillars by using different filters and I will also be creating a whirlpool effect in the water between them also by using filters.

This screenshot shows me editing the first part of the picture. As you can see I needed to sharpen the glass alot more so that I could get the effect shown on my final product.

This screenshot shows how I managed to create the whirlpool effect in the middle of the two pillars. I selected the area I wanted to edit and then selected the twirl effect from the filters menu. I then changed the angle of the twirl to make it alot sharper.

Whirlpool

This is the outcome of my final product after applying the filters. As you can see I have changed the four pillars. The first two i added a glass effect. At first there wasn't a big change to them so i increased the distortion of the filter to make it look alot stronger. As you can see the front two pillars have a strange looking effect to them. For the back two pillars I also added a filter. The filter I added to these was called an ocean ripple filter. Again at first the default setting for the filter wasn't very strong so it didnt look like there was much of an effect being added. So I changed this by increasing the ripple size and increasing the ripple magnitude. As you can see this resulted in a watery effect on the pillar. My final filter which I decided to add was the twirl filter. This filter basically twirls the selected area. I wanted to create a whirlpool effect between the pillars so i selected that area and then added the twirl effect. I then increased how much of twirl depth I wanted to make it look perfect.

Stone River

This is my next image that i am going to be editing. For this I am going to be doing something a little bit different. I am going to be adding another part from another photograph of mine to this photograph. This is to show that I can use different tools on a piece of photo manipulation software to add another piece of a photo to another photo.

This is the other image that I am added. I added selected the duck by using the magnetic lasso tool from the tool bar on the left hand side of the screen and then drew around the duck to get get a perfect outline for moving it across to the other picture.

This is what my image looked like after dragging the duck across to it. After a bit of resizing I decided to put him on the end of the piece in the middle of the river. I thought that this doesn't look finished just like this so I wanted him to blend in with the surroundings so I decided to add a new filter.

This is the filter I decided to add. I wanted the duck to blend in with the pictures surroundings so I decided to add the graphic pen filter to it. It got rid of its original colours and made it look like it had been snowed on which fitted perfectly into the picture. I did this by clicking on filters and then sketch and then graphic pen.

White Ducks

This is what my final image looked like. I decided to duplicate the duck layer that I had put onto my photograph and put him next to the other duck. I put him slightly at an angle to make him look slightly different.

River Side

This is my fourth and final image that I am going to be editing. This image I am going to be showing that I can use tools on a piece of photo manipulation software that can clean up images to make them look alot better. This photo that I took was from one of my practice shoots. This could have been a good photograph but there are way too many things in the shot that make it not very good. For example the big piece of grass sticking out right in front of the shot should not be there, there is way to much traffic in the shot aswell.

This first screenshot shows how I am getting rid of the grass sticking out at the bottom of the screen. To do this I used a tool called fill. What this tool does is it replaces the selected area with something as close to is as possible. I did this by selecting area I wanted to fill and then clicked on edit and then fill and then clicked ok. This then replaced the selected area without making the picture look badly effected.

River Clean up

This is my final product of my manipulated image. As you can see I have taken alot of items of the image that were on the original just by using the fill tool. Below is a list of the items that I have taken off:

* The grass at the front of the photograph
* The bird flying in the middle of the shot
* The post on the left of the shot
* The pylon in the background of the shot
* The traffic on the bridge
* The signposts on the bridge

After taking all of these off this photograph looks alot better and would make the viewer be more focused on the main theme for the photograph which is the river without being distracted by all the other objects that were on it before. I also used to the auto colour tool to change the colour slightly. This makes the photograph look a little bit more cleaned up.