Mutant - Super Strength

Initial Ideas

I decided to go on with my super strength idea so started to develop this idea further with the intention of using a car jack to raise one end or side of the car. 

Development

Examples of unedited photos

One issue I had to contend with was that there was snow on the ground outside so you can't clearly see shadows on the ground which would emphasise that the car is in the air. Also because I was in the photograph, I found it difficult to instruct the person with the camera so I will have to edit my photos into a composition I am happy with. 

I decided to work with this image because I think it clearly shows the car being lifted. I needed to remove the jack from the image which you can see underneath the back of the car. I used the lasso tool to select the jack, pressed backspace and then chose the 'content-aware' fill option to remove the object. I used a variety of selection tools and the same technique to remove some of the unnecessary tyre tracks in the foreground because I found that they distracted the eye from the main subject. 

I didn't like how this photo was portrait so I cropped it into a landscape image as this framed the subject a lot better. Unfortunately this meant that I lost some of the image quality.

Cropping

 I wanted to adjust the saturation of the colour of the car because the whole image seems quite dull. I think this may have been because the snow is so bright, it makes the rest of the image look darker in comparison. Also, the camera itself may have been compensating for this. I duplicated the background layer and used the camera raw filter option to select certain areas of the image and adjust their levels. I also used the same process to adjust the fence because I felt like I was blending in to the background by wearing black against the brown fence. I made the fence slightly lighter and more yellow to make the black of my clothing clearer. 

Colour adjusting the car 

Colour adjusting the fence

Final Photo

Evaluation

I only downloaded Photoshop this Christmas so aside from the tutorials we had during the first term, I am still new to it. I used my notes and online tutorials to help me do what I needed to do. I think it is something I will find time to experiment more with it now I have access to it on my personal laptop rather than just on the computers in the studio. 

Because I was lifting a car which is something some people can actually do, I felt it needed to look effortless for this to actually look like a super power. Looking at the image now, I think i could have made the lack of effort look more humorous to emphasise it, for example, lifting it with one finger. 

Due to the original quality of the image not being great and then cropping this down, I have lost quite a lot of clarity. In hindsight, it would have been better if I had used a tripod with my camera so I could set up the frame myself and spent more time getting the actual shot right rather than relying on photoshop to correct this afterwards.