Assignment 1 - Photo Manipulation

Here is the first assignment for my online elective Photography: Shooting the Truth.  We were suppose to take a couple images we either found or took ourselves and were suppose to photo-manipulate them.  In terms of my skill with photo manipulation it's okay. I am in the Game Development program and we have used Photoshop a lot for assignments, but we have only done a little of this sort of stuff.  We had 1 class in first year that taught photo manipulation.  That was 2 years ago so i had forgotten a a lot of stuff. This assignment was sort of a refresher into photo manipulation.

The first on i did was a cityscape shot of Toronto.

The first is the original and the second is the manipulated one.  My aim for this picture was simply to change the atmosphere/weather.  I changed it from an overcast evening with the sunset in the background off picture to just a regular overcast day.  To do this i had to separate the city and water from the clouds since the clouds needed a lot less done to them.  For the clouds i just turned them black and white and put a bluish-gray cover overlay on it.  For the city and water i did the same but i had to overlay the black/white layer with the colour overlay onto the original image so i could keep the color from the paint, metal and lights on the buildings. I had to a bit of clone stamping on the water to get rid of areas that were reflecting too much colour from the original sky.

For my second image i decided to turn a picture of a green forest into an autumn forest.  I always like the scenery of autumn and since it is officially autumn I decided that it would be something cool to do.  Unfortunately i miss judged how long this would take and had to stop before i was totally happy with it. To start out i black and whited the image then threw a blank layer over it that was set to overlay so the image showed underneath it.  I then grabbed a couple colour from an actualy picture of autumn trees then started brushing over patches of trees with each colour.  Some trees look natural but it seems the red i chose was too vibrant and it's obvious that it's just red painted over black and white.

Well that is it for my photo manipulation assignment.  I actually had a lot of fun doing these, but I am still a little bummed about the second photo.