Week 4

This lesson I started my editing on my milll road pictures that I took last week, I chose four of my best pictures to edit and stick into my book. I started off with this photo of a traffic light with a green man. I wanted to really highlight the green man and show how it controls when we walk across roads and when we don't for our own safety, and how we control technology for our own benefits. The sunlight made it hard to make the green man be fully focused on, so I made the photo black and white by putting a black and white effect on the photo layer but then I realized it makes the green man quite difficult to spot, so I used the Magnetic lasso tool to crop the green man out of the black and white effects so that it would stay green and then I increased the contrast to make it a brighter and more noticeable green so that your eyes are drawn to the green man straight away.

In this photo I had a problem with the lamp post in the bottom, once I started editing I realized that the lamp post ruined the picture slightly, but when I tried to crop it out i couldn't figure out what to replace it with, because when I tried to blend it in with the blue background it never looked right and always looked as if i had just put a random blue blob over it. The green tree leaves on the side of the photo weren't on purpose but I decided that they give the picture a bit more color other than blue so I would leave them in the photo, the reason the photo is so blue is because it was a very sunny day and there was nothing but blue skies in the sky, so I decided to amp up the blue by putting a blue photo layer on to the photo using photoshop. The aim of the photo was to show that even though we believe us as humans are fully in control of the world, there are some things beyond our control such as the sky, hence why I used the sky as a background with a sign that had controlled zone written on it, to show that there is a limit to what we can control no matter how much power we think we have.

For my third photo I took a picture of a cone on a street with a gratified wall for a background. The sunlight caused almost the whole photo to look really bright and funny colored, so I tried out multiple colored photo layers to put over the photo and give it a nicer orange, I decided to use an orange layer because it suited the cone and the sunlight, but it made the shadows seem really faded so I had to increase the contrast and lower the brightness quite a bit, then I used the burn tool to blur out the background a bit so that the photo was completely focused on the lone cone and it's shadow. The aim of the photo was to show how even though we try to control things by making rules and ways of life, there are always people who are willing to break those rules or disagree with them, the cone represents our rules and the graffiti represents people breaking rules. Even though the cone wouldn't prevent people from doing graffiti on walls, people decide to obey the rule of not parking their car where the cone is, but they instead choose to break another rule instead, which shows that usually when people follow one rule it's only so that they can break another one.