Wittenburg,+Haley+-+Texture

After our photo shoot through the cemetery and prairie, these are the photos I chose for the project:


After a lot of editing, I created this piece from just my pictures in the cemetery:

For the project, I wanted to keep my setting as realistic as possible rather than create an interesting graphic like some other people did. I wanted to hint at the idea that a grieving person had come to visit their loved ones with the gift of flowers, but I did it without using an image of a person. I instead placed the rose bouquet on the stone bench, looking as if someone had sat there with them for a while and then left. This gave my image a story/concept while still exhibiting Photoshop skills for an appealing visual.

The first thing I needed to change was the brightness of each picture. I individually raised the brightness on each of them to nearly the highest level, then adjusted the contrast depending on the subject. I also had to merge the level changes with the picture so I could keep the brightness on the objects I was adding to the background photo. Then, I used the lasso tool for the flower bouquet now resting on the stone bench. Although cemeteries tend to be a sad and mournful place, I wanted to make it more appealing - regardless of the cloudy sky. Therefore, I added a total of 3 flower bouquets to add some color and joy to the setting. I also added two more gravestones to fill empty space in the background and next to the bench, which supported my concept of the visiting mourner. Adding these required more use of the dodge tool so I could copy and re-size them to the background photo.

Although the angle of the grey gravestone was quite close to what I wanted, I used the warp tool to adjust the direction it was facing in order to add a more realistic feel to the composition. The flowers next to this gravestone were tricky to edit, because I wanted them to look as if they were resting as close to the stone as possible. Doing this required use of the blur and erase tool, as well as more dodging to remove excess white. After a while, I managed to erase the unwanted color and put them in the place and size I wanted. The second purple bouquet was already taken as a corner shot, so I used the re-sizing option and dragged the horizontal bar far to the left to flip the picture, in order to place it in the bottom right corner. The tan gravestone was also taken as a corner shot, but I liked the angle it was facing. Therefore, I used the dodge tool to remove the unwanted background subjects, then copied the stone to my background image. After re-sizing it to a desirable proportion, I dragged it to the bottom left corner to fill empty space.

In conclusion, I believe I did a nice job on this image, especially for this being my first experience taking photos to edit in Photoshop. I think I met all of the requirements, but I also think I displayed a nice use of concept and composition. The image looks so much better with the brighter colors, and I really enjoyed merging different images to create this piece. The only thing I would change is removing some dark excess in the tan gravestone that I missed, but I overall believe this turned out very nicely.