Photojournalism From A Student’s Eye

I’ve been playing around in Photoshop and Lightroom recently, in an attempt to better know the programs, color, etc. One of my favorite tutorials so far has been Scott Kelby’s tutorial on “Getting That Cool Gritty Look.” Yep, the one all the cool kids are doing, and without having to purchase some overpriced plug-in like LucasArt ($279 – $359).

Kelby lays out the steps to achieve the look as follows:

* Recovery = 100
* Fill Light = 100
* Blacks = Drag this slider to the right until photo looks balanced again, because setting the Fill Light at 100 will wash the photo out big time. In our example, I dragged it to 24
* Contrast = 100
* Clarity = 100
* Vibrance = 100
* Saturation = -81 (basically what I do here is drag the saturation all the way to the left, to -100 (which removes all color, making it a black and white image), and then I slowly drag back to the right until some of the color starts to return to the image.

This can be done in either Adobe Camera Raw, or in the develop section of Lightroom. He also recommends adding a vignette, under the lens correction settings, and softening the skin on the face with a Gaussian Blur and layer mask.

Here are a few that I did:

Dennis Dunleavy, Associate Professor of Communication at Southern Oregon University, is once again undertaking a survey on the topic of digital photo manipulation. Dunleavy writes:

Since August of 2006, I have been collecting responses from readers concerning attitudes toward photo digital manipulation.

In order to sample changing attitudes over time, I am relaunching the survey and will begin to compare results. Anyone can take the survey and all participation is voluntary, confidential, and anonymous. For instance, a respondent’s IP address is not stored in the survey results, which protects the identity of the individual to some extent.

The intention of the survey is to understand the way people think about digital manipulation over time. In 2006, more than 735 people weighed in on the issue. One of the questions I would like to track is whether or not people can tell if a picture has been manipulated. Many people believed they could. Is that claim still true a year later? Let’s find out.

Click here to take his survey, or, you can read a post about a past survey.

I have received a few emails about how exactly I made the header for this blog. I have to admit, I am no photoshop expert. Instead, I relied on one of the flickr toys over at flagrant disregard (now Big Huge Labs).

To be specific, I used the Hockneyizer tool on three separate photos. After playing around with each until I got the framing that I wanted, I saved each file and opened the files in photoshop. I then deleted the white backgrounds, pasted them all into one file, and deleted parts of each photo as I saw fit to make them look layered. The easiest way that I found to do this was to lower the opacity of the layer on top and then use the polygonal lasso tool to select the areas for deletion. Last, I saved it as a .png just in case I change the color of my background in the future.