before...
after...
This image was shot and editing by Zulaikha Khan.
As the you can see the image we initially started with was very grey and dark. It was taken on a very foggy day for which reason the image is not very bright or clear. Therefore the image needed a lot of work. Not only did i had to change the lighting and the sharpness of the image, but also the sky, the snow, the footsteps and the positioning of the couples arms. This panel itself took a lot of time roughly over 3 hours to get it to be perfect and as i wanted it. Below i will breifly explain how i made some of these changes and achieved the end result.
I began by firstly editing the sky. I tried several different approaches but this was the one looked most effective. Before we started our ancillary task i took many pictures of the sky at different times of the day and the week so that we could use them in our project. I was able to get this tremendous purple pink shot of the sky through my window as the sun was setting. I cut the sky into a seperate layer below the actual image of the couple. I then carefult cut around the previous sky (using the 'lasso select' tool) and erased as it was very dull and gloomy. You were then able to see the purple sky below however you were able to tell that one image had been placed on top of the other. I merged the two images together and began to blur our the edges of the sky and the hills so that it looks natural. I also created a seperate 'overlay' layer on which i drew over some of the mountains in the grey shade to make it look like the mountains are fading into the distance. This part of the image was probably one of the more difficult things to do as i had very little experience using photoshop. However after trial and error i was able to make the image look effective.
I then brightened teh hole image using the 'brightness and contrast' tool. I changed the brightness and contrast so that the snow looks more white and flows in with the rest of the image. The next thing to work on was the snow. The concept of this image was to show the footsteps of the couple behind them. But as you can see in the original image we are not able to see their footsteps as the snow is covered with footsteps. So i began to paint over small sections of the snow using the paint brush tool and extracting the colour using the 'eyedropper' tool. Therefore i was able to give the snow slightly different shades of colour at different parts of the image. i then blured this out using 'gaussian blur' so that it does not look flawless and blotchy. This was all done on a seperate layer.
It was then a matter of placing the footsteps in the snow. In one of the images that i shot of the couple walking in the snow a small portion of the footsteps were more clearer. So i cut those into this image. I copied and pasted them behind one another to make a line of footsteps and made them slightly larger than the previous footsteps. I wanted to get a realistic affect of their footsteps trailing behind them. However because teh footsteps were taken from a seperate image the colours of the snow were different. So once again i used the 'brightness and contrast' tool to change this. I also used the 'fragment blur' tool to slightly blur out the edges so the the footsteps merge into the snow.
The image we began with was shot whilst the couple were walking for which reason the arms look slightly distorted as they are of centres. In order to make their arms straight and placed in the centre i had to cut round the arms using a cutting tool and rotate them slightly. I had to then attatch their arms back onto their bodies without it looking like they had arms growing out their waste. It took some time to get the positioning right however once done it looked much better than the previous positioning. I then had to paint over and blur out the area were the arms had been attached and also had to repaint part of the snow were the arms had been moved from.
These are just some of the main things i did in the image and the things that i changed. However there were many other little things that i had to do in order to get this result. For example i selected the couple using the 'magic wand' and changed the contrast of them to make them stand out against the snow yet still look natual. I also had to make sure that sections of snow between their arms and legs were the same brightness and colour and didnt look different compared to the rest of the image. I also had to make edits to the shadows near their feet.
Although this may seem to be a very simple process it took a lot of hard work and effort to produce the final result. I am very proud of what i have achieved as i think it looks very effective and goes excellently with the rest of our products and our brand image.
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