Enhancement?

This exercise looks at changing a portrait in two different ways and looking at how real the images become.

Base

I started with a head and shoulders portrait of my daughter in the shade.

Brightness and contrast of face increased

Using the polygonal lasso, I selected the face and feathered the edges. I selected the brightness and contrast and increased both to a point where they were acceptable.

Saturation and hue of eyes increased

I selected the base photograph again and using the polygonal lasso tool, selected each eye individually. By increasing the blue saturation and hue, I altered each eye to the point of enhancement in the blue range before it moved towards the next hue (green / purple).

I studied both images carefully. I felt that the first change was acceptable because it was similar to dodge and burn tools and enhanced the face. The areas of red / teenage blemishes were smoothed to a point which I thought was OK. Attention is drawn to the face because it is brighter.

The second image where the eyes are altered I think looks OK as a minor change but any more hue / saturation changes and this would not be who I recognize as my daughter. However, my daughter thinks it is perfectly acceptable for rock stars to have their eyes altered so the colour is piercing blue, even though this is not the real colour. It is a question of reality; I like my images to look real, but if my daughter was to wear coloured contact lenses, they would be real, and yet I could alter them with imaging software. 

Another consideration I gave some thought to was the issue of altering body size for fashion magazines. My daughter is a teenager and has friends that are of an ideal weight and shape and want to be slimmer like celebrities and models. I watched a programme about this last year and recall the work done on an image editing programme to make the magazine saleable. In my role as a theatre nurse, I have seen patients throughout my career who have undergone plastic surgery and had the wrong size breast implants inserted. These patients undergo counselling and further surgery and what started out as something to "enhance" can end up having a negative effect. Some years ago, I spent a day with a professional photographer who taught me to work with the model and pose them so that they look good in camera and show them the result to see if they are happy with the image. Her post processing methods were similar to those experimented with so far in this part of the course. I believe in keeping the image as real as possible and enhancing to give the image a pop and make it noticeable. This was a good exercise to question how far I would go in altering an image.

Alteration

This is an image which I took for the highlight clipping exercise in July this year.

Original image

The aim of this exercise is to remove the statue using the clone too, patch tool and taking part of the background and cutting and pasting it into place. I removed the statue from the image. Hopefully a viewer would not be able to see the alteration.

Statue removed

Statue removed and fence altered

I revisited this alteration after working on assignment 4 because I hadn't used the cut and paste tool in the original version. Having learnt how to cut, paste and transform an image using rotate, skew and perspective, I decided that I would look at the fence as the two black areas irritated me. Using a piece of fence which I cut and pasted from the original into the altered image, I fitted it and I am happier with the result because it looks more natural.