Sunday, 15 September 2019

Family Project


My intentions for this project was to create images of contrasting times, for example using people’s baby photos along with current images. I intended to use people’s baby pictures and manipulate the image with the adult version. I wanted the images to have a comedic affect, with the head being slightly larger than it usually should be as I like Jane Longs idea of images not looking quite right.

I scanned the old photos into Photoshop and then looked at the positioning of the person and the lighting in the photos. From this I took photos of the same people, to do this I tried to mimic the lighting in the photo. I also positioned the people in the same way they was in their old photos.




I imported the old pictures into Photoshop and used the quick selection tool to select the face, I then imported as a new layer onto the current photo of the same person. I positioned the cut out face slightly larger on the new image and then locked this layer into place. After this I clicked on the background layer and changed the levels of the image to make it duller and used the color balance to change add more yellow tones to the picture, this then made it easier for me to blend the two photos together. 



To fix the change in skin tones I used the clone stamp tool to blend the two images together, to do this I selected the shadows on the older picture and placed them around the edge of the neck and under the chin on the newer picture. I did the same with selecting the lighter shades and placing the where the highlight would be on the neck, to get rid of the harsh contrast of the highlight and shadows I cloned the general skin tone and placed it between the two shades.


I took inspiration from Zhang Xiaogang’s pieces as he often has a black and white background with the colorful parts on the people. I used the quick selection tool to cut around the person in the image and then selected the inverse so the editing will happen to the background. I then used the image adjustments to bring the saturation and lightness down, this took the color out of the background and made it darker.


To make the image more alike to the artists I selected the shirt using the quick selection tool and increased the saturation using image adjustments. I used the color balance to add red and blue tones to the shadows of the selected part of the image. This led to the different parts of the image being able to flow better together as they all share similar pink/red tones.


The idea for this project was to show the differences between society now and 40 years ago as it was a rare occasion that pictures were taken. This is different to society now as everyone can take photographs due to cameras being built into phones, there's an average of 1.8 billion digital images taken every day. A child today will have roughly 1000 pictures of them online before the age of five, where as a child 40/50 years ago would of had around 10-20 pictures of them. 

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