Part 3 Processing the image: Exercise 14: Interpretative processing

Choose an image that you feel is open to different creative interpretation(s) – an image with a lower dynamic range than usual will give more opportunities for varied processing.

To complete this exercise, make three different versions of the same image, together with a written explanation of what you were trying to achieve, and an assessment of how well you think you have succeeded.

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Original Image

Original Image

It’s quite a low dynamic image which I felt had lots of potential. I used a similar picture in assignment 2 but felt I needed a different one to work on.

First thing I always do is check the Histogram Levels to see how the main areas pan out. Here there is lots of low contrast and a block of dark tones, see below:

I adjusted the black and the white tones to give the picture a bit more depth, i.e., black from 0 to 14, mid-tones from 1.00 to 0.54 and white from 255 to 231:

I decided to investigate using the Image/Adjust/Brightness & Contrast and changed the settings to Brightness -100 and Contrast to 80. I had to take care how much I changed as, when I increased the Brightness the sky became banded and pixelated.

I thought I would see if there would be much difference if I used the Shadows/Highlights to bring out the boat’s dark hull so opened the Shadows & Highlights palette and brought back the Shadows from its initial 50% to 10% and left the Highlights at 0% as this increased the pixilation:

I liked the dark and moody look that I had achieved so felt this would be a good point to leave well alone.

Here’s my first completed image below:

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Second Image

Rather than revert back to the original image I thought I would use the image I had just created as the start point for my second picture.

As per usual, I looked at the Levels histogram first to see what had occurred after I had manipulated the original image and could see that there was a more even spread of all the tonal areas.

I decided to desaturate the picture to turn it to black and white so went to Images/Adjustments/desaturate and it changed to a grey scale picture. I had to be careful that that the Mode hadn’t changed from RGB to Greyscale as this would have meant that I couldn’t introduce any colours later on if I wanted to.

I’ve been exploring infra-red pictures lately and wanted to see if it was possible to change a simple greyscale image into an infra-red one through the options available. I worked my way through the menus and palettes under Image/Adjustments and thought that Selective colour might give some interesting changes. I opened it and saw that I was able to change the various colour areas but decided to concentrate on the blacks so moved the slider the whole way across from 0 to -100 and this, in one movement, gave me the image I was looking for.

Here’s the final image for Picture 2, very spooky especially with the bird flying through it:

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Third Image

For my third picture I went back to the original image to create a sepia toned image which could have been taken in the last century. I went back to my original image:

I had to desaturate the picture as I had described in the previous section using Image/Adjustment/Desaturate:

Once I had desaturated the image I checked to make sure it was still in the RGB Mode so that I could colorize it to a sepia tone. This was okay so I went to the Adjustments palette to add sepia colours. I had to tick the Colorize box and changed the Hue from 0 to 20, the Saturation box from 0 to 25 and left the Lightness at 0. This gave the image below:

I used the Filter Gallery to add various effects but felt all the different styles were superfluous to the original image. The only effect that I did like was the neon glow but it was a bit too uncanny for me.