David Hockney Response

Here is my photo montage image in the style of David Hockney. To create this I took a series of photos of one subject (in this case my front door) and combined them all in photo shop to create one larger image. Then I merged all my layers to only one layer and adjusted Levels and Hue and Saturation.

I liked this image however I feel as if there is not an obvious link between all my pieces. I will redo this joiner picture with a full body portrait of a person, each image reflecting again on my idea of the conflict of the natural and unnatural world, and 'changing landscapes'. Then I will compose and edit it in photoshop, trying to reflect the style of Hannah Hoch like in my photo montage.

For this joiner photomontage I did as I said above, and took a series of photos to compose a full body portrait of a person, and another two series for landscapes reflect natural and unnatural world to be the background. Then to reflect the cutout style of Hannah Hoch I printed the composed joiner of a person, cut it out, maintaining the abstract joiner shape, and then I retook a photo of this and put it back on the image in photoshop. This meant that the person looked lower quality, as if from a newspaper photo (reflecting Hannah Hoch) and stood out against the variety of backgrounds. I separated the two sides of the backgrounds so that natural world was on one side, and unnatural on the other. In photoshop I gave the layer with the person a halftone pattern, to reflect newspaper print (like Hoch used) and colored the two sides of the landscapes appropriately. Red for unnatural, green for natural. These colors are also complementary.

Hannah Höch

Hannah Höch was a German artist of the Dada movement, she was one of the pioneers of photo montage. Her work is easily recognised by the sepia tones that reflect the epoch in which she lived, and the cut and paste style of the subjects in her final image.

Personal response to Hannah Höch

The above is my personal response in the style of Dada artist Hannah Höch, the main theme to my image is the conflict between the natural and unnatural world.

I began by finding the objects I would use, most of the photos I took myself however the cranberries and the large machine as stock images off the Internet. Then, to reflect the cut and paste style of Hannah Höch, I printed the images from my computer, cut out the object, and retook a photo of the cut-out. This gave the pictures a grainy effect and made them much easier to separate from the background.

To make my the background for my final image I filled the background layer with two shades of brown, fading from light brown on the left to dark brown on the light. I made a new layer filled with a cracked paint texture and set this to soft light.

Next I imported all the photos of my objects and arranged them accordingly, for the hand holding the translucent clock I made two seperate layers; one with the clock face the other with the hand. I lowered the transparency of the top layer and set it to multiply (top layer being the clock face), then using the magic wand tool I selected the background around the hand and inverted it. I then changed the mode of the lasso tool to 'subtract from selection' and selected so that only thumb is left.

Photomontage

In David Hockney's photomontage pieces he takes a series of different photographs of the same subject and places them together to create a collage. I particularly like how the maintains the rectangular shape of the photos and incorporates into the final piece the different angles and colors of the photos.

Yutaka Inagawa is a japanese artist that does a lot of work in photomontage, he uses very contrasting shapes, colors and lines to achieve abstract looking work. He creates his images from a wide range of contrasting and carefully cut out objects - these include machinery, fish, road signs, furniture - the subjects of the image are often juxtaposed with each other, he will combine the usual with the bizarre for example.

Stop Motion Animation

Stop motion animation is created from a series of photographs taken of an object or setting in which small alterations have been made. when all the photographs are then put in a continuous sequence it create the illusion of movement.

Below is an example of a music video for a korean song that uses stop motion animation. I particularly like this video because it conveys a very cute story whilst also representing the band and their electronic indie music in a very positive way.

Composite Image

I started by using the magic wand tool on the background of the plane, then I inverted the selection so that only the plane would be selected. After I had done this I needed to use the selection brush to made sure the edge of my plane was selected effectively and that there was no excess white, I also contracted the area by one pixel and added a feather. Then I copied my plane onto the new layer on top of my background image and resized and moved the plane around to achieve the positioning I wanted. Next I duplicated the landscape layer and added blur to it using motion blur and the select tools. I did this again but with more blur on the images in the foreground to achieve a realistic effect. The Final image is pictured above. I used a similar technique on the my own images to create the picture below.

Filters

Pinch Filter- Before I used this filter I used the Hue/Saturation palette to increase the saturation of the photo, this meant that it would make the final image look more surreal once I applied the pinch effect. Then using the setting below I made a subtle yet surreal result that was similar to the fisheye effect of lomography cameras.

Different Cloud- I started by duplicating the layer so that the top layer's blending mode could be set to color and this would result in the original colors not being lost whilst the effect of the cloud could still was there. Then on the bottom layer I applied the different cloud effect, there was not setting I could choose for this however.

Ink outlines- For this filter I decided to drastically alter the hue and saturation of the photo to maximize the effect, changed the Hue to -106 and the saturation to 50. Then I directed applied the filter to the same layer, using the setting displayed below.

Photocopy- I duplicated the layer so that I had two to work with, for the top one I set the blend mode to Luminosity, and with the bottom I used the photocopy filter using the setting below. When these were combined it produced a mostly monochrome effect however the darker parts of the photocopy layer become brown on the final image.

Crystallize- I started by altering the levels so that I could produce much more contrast when using this filter. I made the mid-tones much lighter and increased the black tones. Then in the filter options I made the crystal pattern quite large so as to achieve this effect.

Changing Moods in Photos

For my first image I wanted to change the mood of my photo to be very dark and melancholy . I started by duplicating the layer twice and creating one new layer, on the first one I set the layer blending mode to multiply so that the image would become darker. Then on the middle layer I set the blending mode to overlay and lowered the opacity, then I made the top layer hidden and used the option merge visible layers. Finally I filled the top layer with a medium brown color and set the blend mode to color, I lowered the opacity so that it only produced a dirty effect on the photo.

To contrast the initial image I made this one very bright and the colors bold. I used the Hue/Saturation palette to increase the saturation of the colors, but first I made a duplicated layer and use this on, then set the blending mode to color. This meant that i would not loose quality of the the image. Next I duplicated the layer and set the mode to screen which made the image brighter, I lowered the opacity so that the main features were still visible clearly. Finally I merged the layers and duplicated again, but this time set the blending mode to soft light. I also lowered the opacity in this layer.

Warming Up An Image

To warm up my original image of a clearing in some trees I used the levels palette to alter the red channel, I moved the mid-tone slider a little to the left, and on the blue channel I moved the mid-tone slider a little to the right. Doing so reduced the amount of blue and increased the amount of red, making the photo warmer.

David LaChapelle

David LaChapelle is an American photographer and video director, his unique and surreal style is portrayed in his work in the fields of fashion, advertising and fine art photography. In his career so far he has published four books of celebrity portraits and directed Elton johns show 'The Red Piano' as well as directing commercials for various major companies such as Tommy Hilfiger, Lavazza, L'Oreal and Burger King.
The color in his photographs are often bright and very bold, in his photographs we can see his use of Photoshop to alter the main layout/subjects/setting and so we can safely assume that color is also altered this way. In this particular image the heads of the people have been replaced to give them a sense of anonymity, the colors in this very warm, being mainly orange and yellow with black as a strong contrast. The woman in this image wears white and yellow which ties in with the white and yellow of the eggs in the frying pan. Overall the image is very surreal with no particular concept or theme, but very bold and colorful.

Inverted Monochrome Image

I used photoshop to make an inverted monochrome version of this photograph of a road. I firstly used the Invert option on this program to reverse the colors and lightness/darkness of the photo. Then with the Hue/Saturation palette I moved the saturation slider to the far left removing all color from the image, making it grey-scale. The result of this looks like a black and white negative.

Color

Original image
This image is the original I will use for color development in Photoshop.

Hue/Saturation
The hue , saturation and lightness of an image can be altered independently using the Hue/Saturation palette, sadly a lot of quality is lost when this is changed however different measures can be taken to ensure a good quality image.
In this example I duplicated the original image layer and on this I used the Hue/Saturation palette to make the color change very drastic. I dragged the hue slider to the far left while dragging the saturation a little to the right to intensify the color. then, returning to the main window, I set the layer's blending mode to Color. This made the original image below's color the same as the duplicated layer, it retained quality whilst changing color.

Colorizing
Using the same Hue/Saturation palette an image can be colorized, this option can be chosen by ticking a small box located in the palette. It will alter the hue slider so that it goes from red on the far left all through the color spectrum to red again on the far right.
To achieve this particular image I opened the Hue/Saturation palette and changed to colorize, then i moved the hue slider to green and the saturation slightly to the left to reduce boldness of color.

Intensifing color in selected part of image
Parts of a photo can be independently modified using selection tools in Photoshop select them then different palettes to change each part respectively. I used in this image the Marquee tool with a feather of 30PX because only the color of the sky is to be intensified and since the majority of it is rectangular the tool is appropriate. The feather ensures for better blending of the image overall, also I changed the tool to 'Add to Selection' so that I could also select smaller parts in between trees and change that also.
After I had selected what I wanted I created a new layer via copy so that could change the sky without affecting the original layer. Next I opened the Hue/Saturation palette and dragged the saturation slider to the far right, intensifying the color greatly, however doing so made my image very grainy. To correct this I used the Gaussian blur filter to softer the top layer of sky, then I set the layers mode to color. This corrected any quality loss in the image.

Cropping, levels and skill development

<-Original image
This here is my original photograph of a beach landscape that I used to demonstrate what I have done so far using photoshop elements.

Crop->
Next in elements i used the crop tool to select a part of my photograph to keep whilst the rest is removed.
Doing so means i can adjust the framing of the image, and adjust the height of sand and sky so that it adheres to the rule of thirds. Cropping can completely change the composition of a photograph.

<-Levels
Levels are displayed and altered with histogram. A histogram shows the tonal range of an image, black tones (0) to the left and white tones (255) to the right. There is also a gamma slider which controls how light or dark the mid tones of an image are. An over-exposed image has too many white pixels whilst not a sufficient amount of black pixels. This could be confused with a high-key image which has a lot of white pixels but still has some black as well.
A correctly exposed image has a histogram where the black and white tones run from one end to another, making a full range of different tones in the photo.
An under-exposed image has mostly black tones with no highlights (white tones), there is nothing on the right side of the histogram. A low-key image has most of its pixel in the left in a histogram however still has some highlights to make a full tonal range.
Using levels can help to alter to the tonal range of an image to the photographers liking, different areas can be changed separately using the lasso tool and then opening the levels palette.

Final Image ->

Next I used the Hue/Saturation palette to make the images color more saturated, this made the colors much bolder and brighter. I also opened the Brightness/Contrast palette and used the contrast slider to add more contrast to the image.
Finally I duplicated the image layer, and on the top layer changed the blending mode to soft light and lowered the opacity to about 10%.