Post-Production

Adobe Photoshop –

Because of how much preparation I have done for this shoot (ensuring props, re-visits & practice shoot), when it came to producing my final photography shoot, I had a really strong idea of what I was going to do. This meant that I could get as much on-camera as I possibly could, lowering the time spent of Adobe Photoshop altering the photos. But however for the final shot, I needed to use Photoshop to create the legs. I had prepped all the shots by having the camera on tripod and just getting Kathryn (Arachne) to do the same pose but in different positions, giving me a lot of choice to which legs I wanted to take and add to her.

As you can see from the top segment of the screen grab, I have used multiple other photographs. I placed them into Photoshop and flicked between each one to see which one would work the best, this made it a lot quicker for me to pick the right legs (although I say legs, I am referring to her arms as legs) to use. On the right side of the screen grab, you can see the 4 legs put it as separate layers, I used a layer mask on each of these layers to allow me the ability to simply paint in and out what I wanted on the photo. I found that I couldn’t simply just line both legs from one layered photo up, so I had to do each leg as separate parts, this gave me a lot more freedom to move the leg into position and also use free transform to alter the size without effecting the other corresponding leg.

Above you can see the 4 additional legs on there own with the background hidden. This gives a better understanding of how much of each photo I have taken out to give me the legs I wanted.

Adobe Lightroom –

As I have said, I worked very hard at doing the most amount of stuff in camera as possible to give me little editing to do, this meant that for the main chunk of my editing, I used Adobe Lightroom.

Adjustment Brush:

As you can see from the screen grabs, the small grey circles are where I have used an adjustment brush. In photo’s 2 and 3, I have only used the adjustment brush to add small brightness enhances as creative tweaks, such as the shine on the helmet and the potion bottle, also Kathryn's hair in shot 2. In shot 1 I had a lot more to change. Because of the layout of the stairs, it meant that the flash on the right rembrandt caught the wall a lot and also the flash on the steps caught the ceiling very strong. These two areas were my main focal points to decrease the brightness. I then added increases to both models faces and also the helmet.

Vignette:

For all four photos, I have used a vignette effect through Lightroom. As you can see from the settings of all four of the above images, each one had to be tailored to each photo due to the amount of light on and around the subjects in the frame. Shots 2, 3 & 4 all had fairly natural vignettes to them already because of how I had set the lights, so I only slightly increased that. I however had to add a more intense vignette on the first image because I want them all to be fairly similar in style, to make them merge as more of a collection.

Luminance:

Although the dress was precisely what I was looking for, it was the right style of dress and indeed the right colour, it seemed slightly plain in the photos. Using the luminance, I was bale to increase the darkness of the purple, this has made it much more of a rich colour to view, it also stops it from looking so dirty from the filthy floor. Again with this, I had to edit each dress slightly differently due to the how bright it was from the flash lights. I was able to filter the photos to a one-star rating so that only the four final photos were on my timeline, allowing me to flick between them quickly and get the colours perfectly matched.

Saturation:

In the third photo of the narrative, you can see Athena pitying Arachne. I found that in the composition, having the helmet on the floor created a strong visual message of vulnerability. When I was comparing all the photos, the red feathers on the helmet in this photo were much darker and duller than the others due to them not being as direct on with the light. I decided to use the saturation tool and increase the saturation of the colour red in this shot, this gave the colour a lot more vibrancy and helped it match the previous shots. Although this is a very minor detail, I feel it is important to help give the audience as much visual aid as possible to link all the photos, and it just looked out of place compared to the shine of the helmet.

Crop:

For the third photo of the narrative it was suggested that I could have a crop that allowed me to take out the large barred windows above the models. Although I was sceptical about doing it because I felt it helped to link the first and second image further with the bars; I created a crop. The crop really helps to make the photo a lot tighter and helps the focal point become a lot more direct to the models, rather than the visual distraction of the barred windows above.

Comparisons: