Re-working assignment 4

Re-working assignment 4

Link to assignment 4 page to view original photos: http://wp.me/p7xP3C-l8

After tutor feedback I was advised to correct the colour balance and attempt to sort out one of the images of the series of eight that had noise problems. The final photo has major noise issues which I have also re-worked. This was due to a dark studio mixed with high ISO at 400. In addition I placed the photos into a border which they did not have previously.

I’ve not been at all accustomed to reworking assignment during my course as this is the first time that it was strongly suggested by my tutor. However I found it a really fruitful exercise to go back over work and ‘rework’ it in order to improve it. I think here I have learned a lesson and its no bad thing at all. The fact is I am much happier with the work having re-worked it. Therefore maybe its something about time. Letting some time pass and then revisiting a series seems to yield new results. As it happens the re-working was not major. It was simply a question of finding a formula to eradicate a colour cast of green on almost all of the photos. I doesn’t surprise me that this happened as I was working in a studio photographing dark tones and using one lamp that had a green shade. The issue was that I could not see it on the screen, or, my eye did not detect it well enough. When I got the prints I did see a cast on one of the photos and in fact wrote “green cast” on the back of the photo. My tutor obviously saw better than I did as it was picked up on several. So without further ado and in preparation for sending off for final assessment, I got down to it! I am as I write finishing off assignment 5 today.

Below I’ll give a description of what I did step by step in order to make the adjustments.

Essentially I decided to re-work all of the photos and I am pleased that I did as in the end they all had some degree of green cast on them.

The process I followed is as follows:

a) Light room adjustment——-Temp + 5-7 to red and Tint +10-17. There were minor variations on all photos but this was the average. b) I passed the photos to Photoshop and made the following adjustments: Colour balance layer (mid-tones) +7 to Red and -5 to Magenta. Again there were slight variations.

The ultimate photo had a problem of noise so I followed the following procedure to correct it.

a) Photoshop———>duplicate background>filters, reduce noise>Overall noise reduction setting>Bring strength up to about 15>Presence to about 10>Reduce colour noise to about 12>sharpen detail to 3-6>open surface blur>reduce radius to 15 or so>threshold to about 30>blur radius to 12 or so>opacity to 75%.

I am overall a lot happier with the sequence. The colours seem stronger and more balanced and the sequence has a noticeably less ‘cool’ feel about it. However, with the last photo I am somewhat disappointed with the outcome. I recovered it as far as I can, but I feel that essentially there was too much darkness to use an ISO of 400 although I thought I would have got away with it. I had used a different light set up as an experiment on the last photo to give a slightly different emphasis. I realise now in retrospect that this did not work quite as I wanted it to. The light is obviously not the same as the other frames and this somewhat throws the sequence out at the end.