Monitoring - Photoshopping Pictures (Article 1)

During the mock-up process I took my own pictures but left them on my home picture and so was not able to use them in my mock-ups and had to use pictures off the internet. This week I have been editing my original pictures and putting them into my article. Firstly I editied this picture of a banana by improving the brightness and exposure and editing out the imperfections to make it a much nicer, more appealing banana that will go well with my article's colour scheme, and make readers want to eat them. I use a mixture of the clone tool and the regular brush tool to airbrush out the brushes and spots. I took samples of the banana's skin colour when using the brush tool and samples of the clear areas of the banana's skin using the clone tool to create a sucessful, natural looking effect. I tried to make the banana as light and fresh looking as possible but this sometimes meant I had to use the burn tool on the edges to create shadows to look more realistic, and the blur tool to hide the way the banana had been cut out and put onto a transparent/white background.  Overall I think I was successful in doing this because I was using simple, easy to use tools on Photoshop that I have experience in using and I ensure I got a clear, sharp original picture even if the lighitng and the look of the actual bananas wasn't perfect. I didn't have any difficulties and I was fairly quick at completing the process because I am used to using these tools on Photoshop.

The next stage of my photoshopping I had to do was to apply more or less the same process to my pictures of nuts, however this didn't involve any airbrushing just colour, and levels needed to be adjusted before again cutting these out and putting them on transparent/white backgrounds. I felt these images were a little more difficult to manipular however I think because of the lighting of the original pictures perhaps, and so I had to carefully blur the edges and use the burn tool again to add shadow to make them look more natural. Another factor that affected this was they had slight shadows behind them that the magnetic lasso tool would include when I was trying to cut them out which was dark and looked weird against the pale yellow background so I had to take care to remove this too. This made the whole process a bit more tedious especially because the nuts often has complicated outline shapes, but I still completed it within good time.

Next I created the circle shaped pictures of food to go next to my whole grains section of my article. Again this was a fairly simple process, adjusting the colour and levels of each of the 4 pictures I used and then using the elliptical marquee tool to cut out circles of the pictures and paste these into one document. Although the process was simple, I took a bit of re-arrangement in order to get the right proportions of circles and arrange them the right distance apart so that they would fit properly in the allocated space of the article, originally I only used 3 circles but these didn't take up enough space and so I added a fourth.



Finally I had to edit the picture of the point shoe that I created out of the possible ingredients you can use for 'trail mix' (the fourth section of my article) Again I adjusted the colour and levels and cut it out and put it on a transparent/white background. This part took the longest because the outline of all the pieces of food was so complicated, and I had to also remove the spaces in between the pieces to become transparent.