In today’s workshop, we began practicing with picture editing on photoshop. We used some of the photos taken in the last few weeks of this module to crop, brighten and saturate our images to make them more aesthetically pleasing. I have previously edited photos in photoshop using basic techniques, however, I haven’t previously used adjustment layers.
Image 1
In editing this image, I decided to change the saturation, the vibrance, the brightness and the contrast. Using the vibrance adjustment layer, I set the vibrance to +41 and the saturation to +8, thereby boosting the warm colours in the image. Using the hue/saturation adjustment layer, I further emphasised the intensity of warm colours in the image by setting the saturation to +7 and the lightness to +4. I felt that the image was too dark and that the colours still weren’t as aesthetically pleasing as they could be so using the brightness/contrast adjustment layer, I set the brightness to 43 and the contrast to -17. This brightened the image and drew more of the colours out. I then cropped the image to a 4:3 ratio and moved Rosie to the side to better fit the rule of thirds.
Image 2
My second photo, taken as part of workshop task 1, needed a lot of work as it was not very well lit and was too large to be aesthetically pleasing. I first used the vibrance adjustment layer to edit the images colours. I moved the vibrance slider to -7 and the saturation slider to +4, a slight but noticeable improvement. I then created a brightness/contrast layer. I set the brightness to 49 and the contrast to -11. I then cropped the image using the golden spiral to draw more attention to the construction workers while simultaneously focussing the image onto the building more. In doing so, I believe the image worked better with the story it was linked to.
Photographic Journalism 
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