Picture Editing

Album Cover Photo

My original photo was taken on a Olympus Zuiko Digital ED with a 14-42mm Lens, The settings I used to capture the picture were... ISO 400, 15mm Zoom, f/22, 13.0s Shutter Speed. I used these settings as the lighting was already very dark and yet the focus on what to capture was the light trails of the sparklers rather than the figure(me) stood there. Therefore choosing an ISO of 400 meant that the picture would capture the light trails, slightly me and hardly any of the background behind me, also I had a 13.0s shutter speed therefore I had to balance the light capture despite I also had the aperture at its highest to also balance the amount of light that was capture so in turn it would not ruin the picture. However, despite all these settings I made an honest mistake in not setting the camera to take the picture as a RAW file, so the picture was taken as a JPEG but despite that I was still satisfied with the quality of the end product.

Original Photo

My edited photo was done using Photoshop CS6, the features i used to edit my photo within photoshop were... Shadows/Highlights, Curves and Brightness/Contrast. At first I used Shadows/Highlights to fade out the background and the figure(me) and make the LightPainting stand out more, I also used Curves to make the background fade slightly but without effecting the resolution and quality of the picture. I in turn used Brightness/Contrast to change the the way everything stands out using the brightness bar and the slightest movement of the contrast bar as the quality of the picture was lost with too much use of the contrast bar. I also used the warp text feature to get the "curve" look on the below text, in order to do so I had to rasterize the text first.

First Edit

After my first edit I started to contemplate on ways in which I could improve the look of my photo without adding too much to spoil the authenticity of the picture itself. Therefore, I decided to improve the "wonky" look of the below text, so I retyped out the text and used the "create warped text" button to create the symmetrical arc shape. I also changed the tracking on the text to make the letters closer together so the text wasn't stretched too far across the picture. Next, I decided to experiment with the colour of the light painting, in which I had to cut that certain part of the picture out, and then select blending options, then selected to add a gradient overlay and reduce the opacity so the colour wasn't solid and created more of a highlight effect.

Final Edit