Exercise:Enhancment

For this exercise I need to enhance a photograph, as this needs to be a head and shoulder shot I took advantage of taking this one at the same time as the previous exercise. My husband as very piercing eyes at times and I wanted to see how the enhancements would work on him.

This is the starting point all I have done is crop it slightly and adjust the clarity slider.

I then masked off the area I didn't want to adjust using the quick selection mask set at 50%  hardness, and then increased the brightness and contrast on his face.

I then went on to use a quick selection tool to draw round the iris and pupils of both eyes before adjusting the saturation and brightness of his eyes. 

Finally I adjusted the hue of his eyes, In doing so I changed the colour of his eyes from blue to green, I felt that that changing the colour of his eyes was a step too far and that reality had been tampered with, I think to enhance the eye colour if fine but to change the colour completely is wrong.

The photograph above it the finished article after the saturation adjustment has been done.
The photograph below is the finished article after the hue adjustment has been done.

I will let readers of this blog decide which they like best.



Now may be the best time to talk about the ethics of enhancing photographs in particular the enhancements of famous people that are done by the press, and the pressure it puts on normal people to look like that.  In particular when people are made to look a lot slimmer than they are, or they have their waists made smaller and their chests larger young girls are very prone to believing what they see in the press is real and they think if they were slimmer prettier taller etc they would be happier. People are slowly realising that the images are not real and in fact some celebrities are now saying no air brushing, something I applaud them for doing. hopefully this may also help reduce the amount of anorexia in young people.  About a year or so ago there was a programme on the TV with Gok Wan the well known stylist, he produced a series of three programmes with young people about making them feel normal, in the one a young girl was staving herself almost to death to look like the photographs of models she saw in magazines, to begin with he couldn't make her see the photographs were 'fake' and that no one really looked like that, in the end he took her to a model shoot where she met a model and watched her being photographed and then saw the photographs after they had been 'enhanced', when she saw the difference she finally started to see how people are 'dupped' ,that programme may well have saved her life.

As I said earlier there is nothing wrong with a small amount of air brushing for want of a better word, but this really should be limited in its use, to maybe the removal of blemishes and the like.