I'm not dead, I promise. Just super busy and slow at editing photos. Here are the pictures I've posted on my Instagram/Facebook, I posted these thinking I would be done with the rest in a week and I would have all photos and a write up on the blog, but clearly that hasn't happened. I promise I will work on them as soon as possible though.
Monochrome and Photoshop experimentation
As you can see just a few posts down, I reedited some old portrait photos of a friend. Now, for some reason, I really like the look of long hair partially covering the face/eye of people because I think it adds a dramatic, mysterious, edgy look to the person. And when I think "dramatic, mysterious, edgy" look, a lot of times I also think of black-and-white images that just look "gritty", sort of like an action comic/manga. I decided to give some of the photos a monochrome conversion, and then the handdrawn effect that I previously used with another friend's pictures. For both pictures I used the same process: I edited the picture in Lightroom, converted the picture to black and white in Lightroom, adjusted the picture some more to have more contrast between blacks and whites, loaded the picture into Photoshop, added the handdrawn effect, and messed with the curves to add more contrast. I have to say, I absolutely love the results, see for yourself:
While I love the handdrawn effect's results, I still love the original black and white conversions I made that were the base images for the handdrawn effect images. Take a look here, I think you'll see why I love them so much, too:
Also, this was from a little further back, but I played around with black and white conversions with the subject facing away. For these images, I feel that facing away provokes ideas of reflection and thinking. I added the black and white conversion and softened the image to make this reflection and thinking appear to be about the past, locked in memories but distant and untouchable.
Messing Around with Photoshop
While I was going through photos from our hikes, to annoy my friend I took random pictures of her. Some of them actually came out pretty well, although dark and noisy. But, I thought they would look good in black and white, and after adjusting everything and converting to monochrome, I realized I wanted the pictures to have a hand-drawn effect/look.
For the first picture, I wanted a more delicate, "angelic" photo, so I maxed out the value of Lightroom's Noise Reduction tool so the image was completely smoothed over. I then softened it before plugging it into Photoshop to create the handdrawn effect. The first image is the final product, the second image is what I started with.
For the second image, I decided to go with a more "gritty" appearance, so rather than reducing the noise in the picture, I amplified it by hardening all the lines in the image using Lightroom's clarity tool. I then plugged the photo into Photoshop to create the handdrawn effect. Again, the first image (third in the series) is the final product, and the second image (fourth in the series) is what I started with.
