Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Self-portrait


I actually had a very hard time with this portrait. Editing the individual images themselves was pretty straightforward, but they kept locking themselves and becoming part of the background so I couldn't move them or edit them separately afterwards. Even though the composition may be a little cluttered towards the bottom, I'm relatively pleased with how it turned out.


I worked a lot with hue saturation and transparency with this composition. I wanted to create a dreamlike image, since this is kind of like me reminiscing about my wedding day. I didn't want stark colors, so I toned each image down and reduced the saturation. The background is a picture I took at a garden. I liked the composition and the unusual walkway next to the water. After reducing the saturation of colors, I pasted on an image of my husband putting a wedding band on my finger. Originally, my other hand was present in the image, but it looked funny just floating in midair, so I erased the other hand, which overlapped the wedding finger hand. I then used the stamp tool to fill out the part of my arm that had been overlapped by my other hand. Then I added a full-length wedding photo of my husband and I and made it a little more transparent and slightly blurry. I also had to change the angle of the image so that we'd both be standing on the walkway. Lastly, I wanted to have myself actually looking back on that scene so I took two pictures of myself and uploaded them. I reduced the saturation of these as well, because their stark colors clashed with the subdued background. I also wanted to create a softer tone, so I used the color balance tool to put more yellow into the two images of myself. I reduced the transparency of the eraser tool and slowly wore away bits of each image to try and make them seamlessly flow into each other. I finished off the composition by using the smart select tool to select all the major images and then inverted the selection. I applied a motion blur to the background to put more focus on the main images.

3 comments:

Adele said...

I would like to see one image clearer or in focus ,But to over all picture works for me.

Marshall said...

I don't know... I would take out one of your faces... the overall theme of this seems to be, with the fast-moving motion blur in the background, and the two faces, it seems to portray a feeling of "having moved too fast" or that you are having second thoughts. These are all strong images, I just think that they come together to form sort of a confusing narrative. You could decrease how crowded together all of the images are, and maybe put it into a landscape view. Give the images some room to breathe. I am thinking that this picture is intended to show how happy you are about your marriage.

Kyunga said...

It is. And yes, when I finished the composition I thought immediately that it should be in landscape instead. But I'm still not extremely savy with this program and I couldn't figure out how to change the background separately from the images. I used GIMP and I'm not sure if that made it more confusing or difficult, but yeah I definitely think I made the composition too cluttered as well. Thanks for the great review and advice!