P4: Organise Photographs and Apply Processing Techniques

 In this report, I will explain how I have orgainised the photographs I have taken for my cinematic photography project. I will also talk you through how I edited my 10 final photos and how I experimented with exposure.

 

  

 

 Here you can see I have organised all of my photos into different folders to help me pick the best quality photos to edit. I decided to do this using the star system. I did this Adobe Lightroom because this is a professional photo editing software. I named each folder after the star sytem so it was easier to find the best quality photos I wanted when I ranked them.  This ensures that my photos are organised. As you can see I placed my 10 bet photographs into the Photos To Edit folder so I know which ones to edit.

These screenshots demonstrate how I have used the star ranking system for my images. You can see the stars at the bottom of the screen. There are several reasons why I didn't use my other photos: some of them are blury/out of focus, the subjects are not acting correctly (eyes closed in photo etc), the lighting isn't the greatest, I didn't use the best camera settings for the photos...

 

Editing my Photographs

 Cinematic photography around Doncaster is my theme. I need to edit my photos to match this. The idea is that my photographs will look like they have been taken from a real movie scene. I chose to photograph for the following genres: Romance, horror and action.

 

                                 Raw Photos Before Editing

 

 Here are my original photographs. As you can see my photos look very bland and boring. The photos are under-exposed, the colours look very muted and they don't correspond to the intended genres. By editing, I want my audience to be able to tell me what genre each photo is replicating.

 

Romance

Horror

Action

 

Exposure

Exposure refers to how dark or bright area of a photo is. Under-exposed means that the area is too dark and over-exposed means the area is too bright. Professional photographers will try to make sure that their photos are at the correct exposure to make sure that their photos are the most asthetically pleasing as possible. In some cases, exposure can be a benefit to the photos depending on what effect the phtoographer is trying to achieve. 

 

   This is a histogram that records exposure and colour. On the left, you can see a spike that represents under-exposure on the right you can see a small spike that represents over-exposure. You can also see that the main colour on the left is blue and on thr right it is red.

In this photo, you can see the areas that are under-exposed (blue) and over-exposed (red). This is one of my romance genre photos so I have edited bright lights and warm colours into the environment. I decided to keep the original exposure because it looks brilliant for the genre.

In this photo, you can see that the lights and window are over exposed. I decided I wanted to fix this.

Here you can see I have created multiple masks. I masked the lights by using the brush tool and then lowered the whites with the slider to stop them from being over exposed.

There are no over-exposed areas of this photo now. However, you can see that a lot of it is under-exposed. I decided to leave this. The idea behind these action photos is to make them look like a training montage. Therefore having under exposed areas fits the genre conventions in these kind of movies.

Here I slightly increased the exposure of my photo. I did this by masking the two subjects and increasing the shadows, blacks and contrast.

                             Final Photos