For my development I began by heading out to a field in the back end of no where to take some pictures for my 'empty field images'. I was very specific with the kinds of images I wanted; although I needed a sunny day with good lighting I still wanted a barren and muddy looking landscape to give the full dramatic 'world without bees' shock for my audiences. I chose this photo to develop into my billboard image.
Of course the brightness of the image didn't really give the strong sense of doom and gloom that I had wanted to convey so I had to add an element of depression to the image by desaturating the colours and washing out the brightness. This wasn't too difficult, the difficult bit came next.
Because the key element of my augmented design relied on the same field empty and then full of flowers once you interacted with it, and seeing as the time of year it is meant I wouldn't be able to photograph the same field empty and with flowers it, it meant I had to improvise.
I took my image, brightened it up and then searched for some flowers I could add into the field. This was an awkward time consuming stage in itself, I needed British wildflowers for a British audience, I needed a high quality of photo as well as a large photo that would cover the entirety of my field. And most annoyingly I needed an image that matched the depth of my existing photo; it needed to blend in as if it were already there so it needed to be set at a similar distance. Still after many tweaks to google's advanced search options I finally found an appropriate picture.
I decided the best way to integrate my found image into my snapped image was to use a layer mask. Now I love and hate layer masks, yes they are useful, yes you can add or remove elements to and from an image, but when it comes to highly detailed pictures it becomes fiddly and it's very difficult when something is so detailed to make it look genuinely a part of the existing picture.
There's also a particular problem I have with layer masks and it's that if I stare at one for too long it will never look right. This happened to me with this image, no matter how much I zoomed in and out, tweaked and… twerked? The image didn't look right.
Happily though I took a break, got some outside opinions and it was agreed that they had merged together well, with a few issues regarding colour which were easily solved.
In order to make the entire 'after' image look bright colour and full of flowers I needed to add some leaves to the bare trees. This was something I hadn't done before and so with every new technique I attempt I looked for a tutorial to guide me through it.
According to the tutorial I found it was actually pretty easy, using a brush tool, messing around with the jitter, painting and then overlaying the image I managed to turn bare tree into full leaved ones. Although close up it was quite easy to see the brush marks, once zoomed out they looked rather realistic.
I now have a before and after for my billboard, for the text I want to use indesign to get the alignment correct, so next will be the bus stop and magazine images. Knowing I can either crop the existing image or repeat my techniques on other images will save me a lot of time when it comes to producing the others.
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