David Lachapelle

David Lachapelle was born March 11th, 1961. He is known as a photographer and video/commercial/film director. David is noted for his surreal, unique and often humerous work.










David has written four books about photography that include 'Heaven to hell' and 'Lachapelle Land'. He has also done portraits of such famous people as David Beckham and Lady GaGa. Futhermore he has directed music videos of Elton John and ohers and enjoys directing adverts, most recently Lost and Desperate Housewives.

Monochrome

This was my first attempt at turning a picture black and white. At first i enhanced it by removing the colour.










I then decided to use a better picture as it would look more interesting.

For this picture i created another layer and then inverted the colour. I used the colourize tool to then change the colour of the picture to a light blue. The sun goes black because it has been inverted from a light orange. It stands out in my picture because of the rest of the picture being a lighter tone.




Filters

You can use different filters to change a photo competely. For eaxample i have used the noise filter to change this photo. As you can see the picture has become noisy and is blurred. I also changed the colour of the picture for added effect.

In this picture i have added a granite effect which looks quite different to other effects. To do this, you go to filter at the top of the screen and then select which filter you would like.

In this photo, i have changed the photo filter. I made the warming colour grey which subtly added grey tones to the photo.

Overall, filters are extremely useful for making photos improved. In the photo above, i really like how the picture has a darker yet cool side to it.

Colour

Hue and Saturation

This is when the colour is added to the picture or drained. As you can see below i dragged the saturation bar down to the bottom which drained the colour out of the picture.

This is my print screen of what i did. The saturation bar is at its lowest but i didnt change the Hue or lightness of the picture. It is at -100 compared to the other two which are at 0.

Hue is refering to the colour in the picture such as red, green or blue whch you can change in the picture. An example of this is what i have done to the left.

I have turned the sky pink. I did this by using hue and dragging the bar slightly to the left. I quite like this effect at it focuses more on the sky than the water, which is what i want it to do. To improve this picture i think i could crop the wooden post in the left hand corner and perhaps make the outline of the skyscrapers slightly darker so they are more noticible.

Colourize
There is also a colourize tool in Enhance. This is very useful as it allows you to change the colour as a whole on a picture. For example if you wanted the picture to have a pink tint, you could use the colourize tool to help you.

Levels

Levels are very useful in photoshop as they allow us to remove any part of the image without ruining the original copy and edit the selected part by itself.
A histogram shows us the light throughout the image we have. The horizontal axis represent tone and the vertical axis represents quantity.
A correctly exposed image is when the light in the image is at its best. An underexposed image is when the image is too dark whilst an overexposed image is too light.
I have used the magic wand too select part of my image as it helps select which part of the image i want. I can then edit that seperately using such tools as hue and saturation. To access these tools i go onto Enhance and then select which tool i would like, such as adjust lighting or colour.
A low key image is where the shadows are in most of the photo whereas a high key image is where most of the tones are in the highlights.

Sunset Pictures

This is my improved attempt at the picture i took in Florida. The one on the left is my original copy and the one on the right is my improved version. i cropped the image to get rid of part of the darker water in the bottom left hand corner as i felt this took the sense of perfection away.
Futhermore i darkened the city in the background to give it a more presenting role. The sun has been greatly changed to a slightly more orange colour and i had to change the sky as well.

The contrast has been altered slightly to create a dreamlike sky but i found it hard to keep it looking realistic. I used a different layer to remove a wooden post which was is in the corner and then took the colour of the sea to fill in the gap.

Using the Cropping tool

The cropping tool can be used to get rid of any part of the photo you dont want. For example if you had a beautiful sunset but there was a tree to the side, you could crop it and get rid of ti. this will improve the quality of your picture because any excess can be removed.

First Photoshop Lesson

Last week we had are first lesson on adobe photoshop. We took a desert road picture and edited it to improve the overall quality. I learned about levels and layers to improve the photo without ruining the original copy.
We also learnt about contrast and how to improve the image by changing the contrast and brightness. We learned how to crop images so they are the right size we want them to be and get rid of any rubbish.