Molly Carr’s Before and After

For my final project I aim to take pictures of items associated with witchcraft and combine them with portrait images of my sources.

For this week’s before and after task I have experimented with setting up an image of a crystal and shooting in raw.

Firstly, I set up the shoot by creating a background. I used white tissue paper and ensured I was near natural lighting. I then took the images on my iPhone, using ProShot. I feel by shooting in raw I was able to get more fine detail within the crystal. However, I did find it challenging to get the right white balance, I overcame this by adjusting my settings to auto.

I then edited my image using Snapseed. I explored with increasing exposure, highlights and saturation to make the purple pop. I then decreased the shadows and increased the contrast as I did not want to loose the black border of the crystal.

I then used the lens blur feature to blur out the background and put more focus on the subject. I also used the heeling tool to get rid of a tiny hair I noticed on the crystal.

If I were to do this again I would go even further with the saturation to make it extremely purple. I would also have liked to take the images outside in full natural lighting to see how much detail could be exposed within the crystal.