Photoshop Workshop.

Throughout my experiments with manipulating my red images in photoshop- I found myself getting frustrated at the seeming lack of diversity in my designs- red seeming a really difficult colour to use- becoming too pink or too orange at the slightest colour tint or de-saturation.

Therefore, I decided to try and use this to my advantage and show the variation of tones and the transition throughout the colour wheel with my designs.

I experimented with different tints and hue saturations, and then was inspired by my picture of the camera necklass and 35mm film- to create a "light leak" look- as you would find on a 35mm print if the negative film had been over-exposed to light...like in these images sources online...

...Because the light leaks so often have yellow and orange colouring, I thought they would work really well with my red images...

 To create my light leak effect, I went through this process:

-Open your image in Photoshop.

-Click 'Q' for the quick mask.

-Click 'D' to ensure your background colour is white, your foreground colour is black.

-Click 'Alt'+ 'Backspace' to mask your image (a red tint will appear)

-Select the 'X' key to switch the background and foreground colours.

-Select the paintbrush tool, (with the white foreground colour)- set the hardness to '0' and the flow to '25%', and paint a strip where you would like your light leak to appear on your picture.

-Click 'Q' to unset the mask.

-Create a new curves adjustment layer.

-On the RGB channel, bring the top right hand corner to the left (by around three sqaures).

-On the Red Channel, drag to the similar position as the direct RGB channel.

-On the Green channel, bring the top right hand corner down by around one square.

-On the Blue channel, bring slightly less left that the red channel.

-Create a new layer, and repear the first 4 steps, but this time, select the orange paintbrush and colour over the white strip, and then set the light mode as 'visible light' (change the opacity if it is too over-processed, not to your satisfaction, etc.)

-Repeat this process with purple.

-Create a  new layer.

-Select a white paintbrush, and cover over your image in places you would like over-exposed.

-Change the light mode to 'overlay'.

-Create a new layer.

-Select a smaller brush size and lower level of flow percentage. 

-Brush white over this area- neatly, as this will have no light alteration.

-I then merged the layers to create one image layer, and adjusted several elements- such as colour saturation, brightness and contrast and applied the dodge and burn tools to particular areas in which I wanted to add highlights of exposure or darken shadows.

A few experiments and processes here...

a light-leak post orange brush (above).

post- 'vivid light' mode on the orange paintbrush tool- this made the picture look overly-bright and processed. I toned the image down by using the 'soft light' colour mode and decreasing the opacity levels.

 Here, I cropped the image down to draw focus to my star projector- I began experimenting with this as I liked the variation of colours the LED light produced, and the way it manipulated the brightness and the shadows of the red paper behind it.

On this image, I used the clone tool to remove the 'STAR MASTER' text (I thought that this detracted from the image) and brightened the image. Despite the colours being more visable in this version, I preferred the darker, shadowed picture as this image, I believe, looked rather pixelated and un naturally lit.

 

Here, post- curve adjusment- when I manipulated the curvature of exposure in the RGB channel.

 

Here, increasing the contrast- I liked the darkened shadows but the globe looked too bright for my liking. 

 This image shows post- orange and purple paintbrush editions.

I liked the subtlty of this edit, but felt that the purple colour was a little too bright- thus, I went onto desaturate the colour in my final edit.

And my final outcome designs...

I think that the image above was perhaps my favourite one- the image that inspired the series, and I think works particularly well with the colour of the kodak 35mm cases.

  

The kaliedescope image (above) was probably my least favourite- I don't think that the colours are as saturated as they should be- not "popping" enough with too great an amount of white filter placed over the top of the image- I should have decreased the opacity of this new layer.

The de-saturated purple paint worked much better on this image, and worked subtly with the spectral tints within the bubbles.

I really liked the design with the 3D glasses, and the way you could see the text behind the blue translucent film. A fun experiment, I think that this design was probably the most realistic and suited to the 35mm light-leak aesthetic.

(above) My initial idea for my postcard back- keeping it simple, connecting to my red theme.

Again, here, just a minor edit- colouring in the counters of my letters at the bottom. I'm still unsure which design I like best, so I'll print both to test which suits the style of the images (though, currently, I am currently favouring the first design).