Photography and Digital Enhancement

1. To get to this image I adjusted the brightness and contrast

hue and saturation and then I took the paint brush and painted white onto the spots with light to create shine. I used white. I also used the color burn brush and black to create a smudge look under her eyes.

2. To get to this image I changed the tone of the skin. I  knew the look I was going for so I wanted her to be very pale. I also used the blur tool on the makeup I put under  her eyes in order to soften the effect of the smudged makeup. I used the color burn brish to make her eyes seem darker underneath and around the edges. I changed the sharpness of the tear by sharpening it and useing the adjust sharpness option so that it stood out. I was attempting to make it a focal point but realized that the tear was lost, it just was not big enough to be noticeable so i gave up on it. I went under her eyes and put a shine spot (view right eye) this made her crying more obvious.

3. I needed a more intense face, her face has very soft features so i highlighted h er eyes with the lasso and then adjusted the intensity by altering the brightness and contrast and then I made the whites of her eyes lighter with more white. Her lips were a little bit to happy for the look I was trying to go for. She has naturally upturned lips so to my "convenience" so looks happy even when she is sad. To fix this problem I decided to try out the good old fashioned distort: liquify option. By bringing in the edges of her mouth I made her seem less happy. ( To my advantage ;) )

4. Since one of my goals was to sort of recreate the image of the crying shiny babies seen prior to this assignment one of my tasks was to make the shine I created in her skin smoother. To do this I needed to use a "soft" brush and go over her skin in a darker peach tone. It was about one shade darker then her actual skin tone. Her face still seemed way to soft to me (by face I mean all her features on her face) So i needed to intensify them again in a realistic fashion. The baby pictures that I had seen before had a very vintage look to them, almost like old gerber baby ads. I wanted my picture to also have the effect of time. To do this I decided a pin up girl look would be best. To obtain the classical female features and look of the ideal 1940's picture perfect woman I needed green eyes, red lips, dark archy brows, longer-darker-fuller lashes and a beauty mark. For the eys I used three different shades of green, I put red in th e corners and went over the smudged makeup in more black as well as resmudging the makeup again. (I just wanted the green to soften so by darkening the black eye makeup I created a balance while also still being able to have a striking feature.) For the eyebrows I used the clone stamp to fill in the gaps as well as the color burn paint brush (dark brown and black) then using the the liquify tool to get the shape I thought was ideal for a pinup girl. To get the lips i used the motion blur tool then i softened them. The reason I did this was because the lighting on the lips was not even so the blurring managed to blend everything together. Next i used an extremely bold blood red color to get the classic red lip look that I was going for. To create the birth mark I took a pimple that was on her chin and simply painted all the pixles it took up brown then I used the "blur more" option so it did not look like a random paint spot.

5. For the finished product I flipped her, then i blacked out her hair by using the black paint brush and finally i cropped her down to size. Still not completely satisfied with my image I changed the lighting one more time.

I feel as though I managed to recreate the look I was going for the the best of my ability with this program. The thing that botheres me the most is that when you look at my end product there is nothing striking about my picture. It just looks like a picture, but not a very good one. In the end she does not look as sad as i wanted her to and you can not even tell the pghoto was altered in the ways that i altered it. I have not decided if this is  a good thing or a bad thing yet because I did put a lot of work into this image and it jsut was not as great as I hoped it would be. The loss of time was a huge factor because technical glitches seem to always find me. Computers will be the death of me.

- D. Mulrooney

p.s i am calling this one A Lost Tear ( it works well because you can't even notice the tear but you can tell shes crying. PLUS i was angry it did not show up, it was jsut on the wrong side of her face. )