Journal - Experimenting with Photoshop

After experimenting with photoshop, I found a lens flare effect that I can use on all my photos in order to get the lighting that I wanted.

I originally planned to merge the layers of my chosen photo with our attempted lens flares but have found that this looks a lot better than the lens flare that we attempted. I used it several times on the photo below as, with the exception of the two images of Isla, the content is quite basic and so the lens flare effect provides an artistic element to the image.

I also learnt how to create a mirror effect in photoshop (http://www.photoshopessentials.com/photo-effects/mirror-image/) and experimented with that on the photo I have chosen for the album cover. I like how this looks but think it would be quite boring to have one photo mirrored as the album cover.

It's important that the photos in my digipak all link together (using the lens flare effect on all my photos will also do this) so I simply edited the contrast of all my photos to get the hue I desired.

So far, I have only edited three photos for my digipak but am overall happy with how they turned out. After using the magnetic lasso tool to crop the background out of the photo, I copied and resized my chosen photo into a Polaroid stencil. Then I added in our logo and typography at the bottom of the polaroid. This photo will be for a panel inside the digipak.

The last photo I have edited is the long shot of Isla's hair. This was my favourite photo from the whole shoot and I like the simplicity of it. I am considering using this photo for my tracklisting firstly because of practicaility reasons - if I was to include text on this image, (even if it went over the hair) it would not ruin the image as the hair covers most of the shot and the image can easily be framed more to the side. However, if it was to use a different image from my photoshoot as the tracklisting -- the polaroid photo for example -- it would be difficult to add the text without covering up some of the image.

The photo that I originally planned to use for my tracklisting was Isla spelling out her name with long exposure but I feel this photo would make more sense -- as the front of the album will show Isla's face whilst the back will show the back of her head.