Photoshop makes me stress eat. (Week 3 Assignment)

I swear this empty, family sized, double stuffed Oreo package was full yesterday...

-Rebecca Irons

Warning: Contained within this post are the agonies and stresses of a Senior college Female attempting Photoshop for the first time.  Proceed at your own risk.

Week 3 Assignment:

Original Photo

This is the original photo that was provided to us.  (Clearly. I’m not THAT bad at Photoshop...) 

As of right now, there haven’t been any edits applied to the photo.  It is free of any layers that would change its appearance.  The photo is grayed out looking and the colors aren’t vibrant either.  I anticipate I’ll be playing with the colors in Photoshop, considering what we did in class the other day. 

I’m a little nervous about using Photoshop since I’ve never really gotten to play with this software before.  But really- 

How hard can it be? 

–Famous last words.

Step One: Curves

(Two Oreo's down.)

For this first step, our instructions were to apply the curves feature of Photoshop to the photo. (I know you know this, but for the sake of writing 100 words…) The curves icon is in the adjustments section and it looks like a box with an “s” in it.  To get to the special auto options, I held down the alt/option key and selected the auto button.  (Like you showed us in class)  This opened up a new window with further curves options.  I chose the topmost option, Enhance Monochromatic Contrast with the snap neutrals option selected.

This option made the darker colors in my photo darker, and the light colors lighter by appearance.  It definitely took out the gray color and made the regular colors more vibrant.  The grass was definitely greener on this side of the curves edit.

Step Two: Levels

(Seven Oreo's "missing")

This second step was to apply the levels adjustment tool to the photo.  The levels icon looks like a histogram.  To apply this layer to my picture, I was sure to turn off the previous curves layer.  I then used the little black triangle and the little white triangle on either side of the histogram to adjust the photo.  I moved each triangle to where their respective pixels began to appear on the graph.

This editing layer also got rid of the grayness of the original image, as well as made the colors of the image brighter. However, the dark pixels in this version didn’t seem as dark as in the image created from the curves edit.  Perhaps that is because I didn’t move the little triangles enough. 

(Personally, I think the levels edit and the curves edit look extraordinarily similar… Which potentially means I’ve done something wrong. Yikes.)

Step Three: Vibrance

(10 Oreo's disappeared. That's 5 servings.)

The tricky thing about this step is that one of the two links to tutorials dealing with saturation and vibrance wasn’t the correct link.  It took me to a tutorial about levels, and I’ve already watched that video. (AKA the 3rd tutorial link under Photoshop and the 7th link under Photoshop take you to the same video.)  That’s alright though, I tried my best. Anyway, ONWARD.

Because the one tutorial about vibrance and saturation said to NEVER mess with the saturation of images dealing with human beings, I didn’t touch the saturation slider.  The last thing I want is this sweet little girl looking like some bleached blonde Snookie.  (She’s a real life Oompa Loompa from the TV show “Jersey Shore”, in case you don’t know.)

I selected my curves image because I thought it was the better looking image with the slightly darker shadows and barely greener greens.  I applied very little of the vibrance adjustment layer because I thought it sort of made the little girl look sunburnt and pink if I added too much vibrance. 

I hope for her future’s sake that she put on sunscreen… She really should have put on sunscreen.

Somehow during this whole process I consumed over an entire row of Oreo cookies and now I need to spend my entire weekend eating nothing but kale and spending every waking moment at the gym. Whoops.

I hope you enjoy your weekend more than I'll enjoy my kale...

"The Boss" is signing out.

Update: After attempting to take photos for my photo story the entirety of my Oreo package is gone... I hope this means I'll be better at Photoshop in the future, because I'm out of junk food.