Kate was tasked to edit a number of photos for a jewellery company, which will be used for their website. She works with the company photographer and her manager to establish and agree what is needed throughout the project in terms of an overall consistent look including brightness, background colour, size, resolution, sharpness etc. Timescales are also set.
Kate obtains the images from the company shared drive. The images were taking by a photographer and are in TIFF format.
Kate chooses the first image which is a silver watch on a white background. She ensures that she works on a copy of the file rather than the original.
Kate chooses to use a Mac computer with a large monitor, which is company protocol and enables her to work accurately. She will also use Photoshop to edit the image.
Q: Why use Photoshop over other image editing software?
A: It's industry standard and there are a range of editing tools that can be applied which makes editing more accurate and you have more control when editing.
She resizes the image to 1500px by 2250px as per the customers requirements and she ticks the best for reduction box as she wants the image to stay as sharp as it can.
She opens the file in Photoshop and has a brief look at the overall quality of the image in order to establish a plan of what needs to be retouched. If the image was unsuitable then she would go back to the photographer to see whether there was another image. In this instance the image is workable, although the image has a lot of unwanted aspects in the background which she wants to remove. She zooms in at 200% in order to work accurately and uses the pen tool to select around the edge of the watch.
Q: Why use the pen tool in this instance instead of other tools?
A: Well, this tool is more accurate than the others and you've got more control than say the magic wand which often selects bits that you don't want.
Kate removes all of the unwanted parts of the background and then creates a new layer with a white background. Part of the agreement with the customer is that all the watches are captured which the watch at exactly the same time. However, that means that this particular watch needs a button popped out on the right hand side of the watch, which the customer would like closed in the final shot. Therefore Kate creates another duplicate layer so that she can compare the original and uses means that she's not working on the actual original. She cuts around the unwanted part and moves the button to make it appear that the button is in. She uses the mask tool.
Kate checks for brightness, colour and contrast and makes some adjustments with the dodge and cloning tool. She ensures that the image has a similiar colour profile to the other watches that have been edited.
Kate notices that there are specks of dust and dirt on the clock face, which she retouches to remove.
This particular watch doesn't have much variation in colour, but if does she would generally increase the saturation. She does however notice that the silver strap has a yellow tone, so she adjusts so that it is more in line with the actual colour of the watch.
Kate then moves onto to adjust the overall sharpness of the image and uses the unsharp mask.
The customer asked for all watches to have a reflection at the bottom of the image, so she then merges all of the layers and creates a duplicate, uses the transform to flip the image, reduces the opacity and uses a gradient to create the desired effect.
She then saves the image as a JPEG and chooses the maximum quality. The file is saved in the relevant job number folder on the shared drive.
Once all files are retouched they are then sent over to the customer using We Transfer.
Feedback:
Great work Kate. You've clearly got a great understanding of the tools in Photoshop in order to effectively adjust images. A really good piece of evidence that can be mapped across many units.
Mapping:
Unit 35: 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 2.5, 2.6, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 4.1, 4.2
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