Final Piece photos

This was originally my final piece and after completing the editing I was happy with it for a while. However, after looking at it and checking it over time and time again I began to realise some areas that were beginning to annoy me a lot. For example, the shoulder on the right of the photo is a lot higher than the right and despite this being the original proportions of the picture, I thought it looked very odd. Secondly: the hair. It was very difficult to merge the two photos but the hair was definitely the most difficult aspect. Trying to make long hair on a hairless head look natural is a lot harder than first expected. After a while I gave in and decided to try and sort things out a little bit.

To adjust the shoulder, I added a new layer, cut it out, moved it down and then used the clone tool to blacken where the shoulder would have been previously. I then used the blur, sharpen and burn tool to try and remove any unnatural looking areas. With the hair, I decided to add a little bit more so that it fell more naturally instead of simply disappearing. I'm quite pleased with the final result now that I've altered the areas which were getting on my nerves.

The sketch I based my photo on from my ideas
and intentions.

Edited photos from final piece photo shoot

The photo on the left nicely follows one of the sketches I did for my ideas and intentions entry. I liked the gradient of colours in the hair and after editing, I was even more pleased because the shadows and darker areas which I darkened further with the burn tool really brought out the contrasting lightness which I highlighted with the dodge tool. One of the things I don't like about this photo is how the nose is out of focus. It looks a lot like an accident and decreases my like for the photo. I probably will not take this piece any further.

I was pleased with the quality of these photos and the similarity of positions. My idea is to merge the two faces together and to do that the faces need to be at similar angles and proportions so I chose these two. No only that but the fact that they are looking down makes it slightly more interesting than a straight forward portrait, in my opinion. The colours do look quite bland though so I chose to edit them quite a lot by altering the temperature, to make them a little bit colder but when put together with the increase in contrast you can really see the red in the skin which makes the photos look quite raw yet enriched with colour without having a crazy hue. I am pleased with these photos, even though they're quite simple they do show aspects of rule of thirds and look quite interesting. I'm going to use these two photos to create my final piece.

Photo Shoot for Final Piece (unedited)

I took these photos using a Canon 1100d with an 18-55mm lens. In order to get the right lighting, I used an umbrella light kit and switched between gold and silver sheets held up to experiment slightly with the warmth and tint of the photos. To take the photos of myself, I used a tripod and put the camera on a 10 second timer.