Day to night

So last week we worked a bit on our final project which is to take an image from a daytime photo to a nighttime photo. I started with this lovely work of art from my trip to Venice in January:

From there I made some adjustment layers with levels, curves, and brightness. I created a folder for those general adjustments to make it easier to navigate as I work. I made a color overlay with a darkish turquoise color to put in the same folder and then tweaked the color balance a bit to make the adjustments pair more nicely.

So now we can see the overall tone of the image has indeed changed from day to night- starting at the bottom of the image with the darkened shadows on the water leading up to the heavily shaded gondolas   and casting nearly a silhouette on the island of Murano. All that's left is to import a night sky to match our surroundings and I found one for the time being: 

More to come on this!

I took an image of myself in the same position as the girl in the image-

I made a selection from two images, one for the body and one for the camera right arm.

I used the eye drop tool to put the same color scheme of skin tone from the original painting onto my image:

Obviously the dress isn't a perfect match either, so I went through and used my swatches to paint onto the dress the tone that I needed. Since the dress is relatively the same shape at the bottom I can save some time and add in the grasses at the bottom of the image and create the banner and text across the frame. I made a custom brush to complete the texture of the dress and push back the bush a little.

This week I went back and made a clean selection of my lily for the sides of the frame and replaced the previous three with the better selection to make things easier for my layers pallet. I again, used the luminance overlay on each lily layer, making is dull down to the natural tones of the painting.

So as things progress I see different visions for the painting. While sticking to the general theme and mood, I'm making my own characteristic choices about each stage of the process and kind of modernizing the whole piece. 

Painting Portrait- photoshop

This week we are working with pre twentieth century paintings and making a replica in our own interpretation. I chose the painting Maude Adams a Joan of Arc 1872-1953 by Alphonse Mucha (Czech) shown below:

I started the process by creating a color swatch of all the basic colors in the painting:

From there I found, downloaded and imported other image I thought could be useful and save me time in the long run. So I decided that the lilies on the outside of the 'frame' would be a good choice to find an image for. Also, the grass along the bottom and the cherry blossoms that placed around the painting make for a long time painting in photoshop, so I imported images for those as well.

Part of this assignment is to interpret the image as what we see in our minds, so I've added a good amount of color in this particular interpretation. I placed borders around the image to help build the suspense of what it contains. While placing these images I used overlays and layer masks to show, hide and detail the different images to fit my cause. Using my pallet I pulled in a color fill for the background to give the project a similar feel to the painting I started with.

This is an image taken of me last week. I had kind of a bad hair day so I cloned the background to cover up the fly aways atop and around my head. 

I also used the healing tools to blend any obvious differences in the cloned background. Since I have a face full of freckles the healing tool wouldn't work for my skin, I used the Clone tool to hide any blemishes or stray eyebrow hairs. 

I used the paintbrush to lighten my teeth slightly, by using a low opacity brush and only clicking once for the whole set to avoid overlays that would cause a color discrepancy. I did the same for the whites of my eyes, to make them stand out more.

I cloned my eyeliner and used the healing tool to blend it to areas where it had worn off. 

Before:

After:

Later tonight I'm going to scour the network share for an image of someone else in my class that may have a feature on their face that I'd like on mine. I'm considering making my skin freckle-less, might need to do something more dramatic, maybe I can find some wicked hair!