14 Week Challange - Week 2 "Prepare"

Good Morning everyone. Today we will be working with the word prepare as given by Illustrationfriday. To start off I started researching for the word prepare, and found out some ideas of where I can go with this. Because I have chosen photography as my main element to display my art in, I have to choose carefully of what i should photograph. As mentioned in my previous blog, I will be looking at Leif Peng's Artists collection and look for inspiration.

 Inspiaration

From the different artists, I chose Richard Gates as my inspiration. In his artwork, he showed an apple which is very stationary with a bunch of apples in the background and people harvesting the apples. He tried to display texture on the apple and cut out the apple from the frame. For the colours he used complementary colours to make the apples pop. 

Thumbnails

For my thumbnails, I tried to incorporate fruits that are being cut and prepared to be served. But during my thumbnail process, I had an issue with the subject. Looking at an apple is very boring to look at, therefore I had to create something that wil catch the viewers attention but didn't know what that was yet.

Shoot

Knowing that just apples was very boring to look at, I decided to just shoot the apple and thats when i got inspired. I thought back to when I would see those ads about pizza's and saw the nicely cut vegetables falling down. I wanted to create something along those lines. But the issue was that if I were to take an image and make the fruit fall down, it will turn out blurry and plus it will not stay in the form that i want it fall down in. So I had to make something to hold the fruits in its original position. 

The fruits i was using was an apple and a banana, half cut and falling down. I used toothpicks for apple to make it hold it in place. At that point, I knew I had to shoot at a low angle so that i can see the distance between the ground and the apple. And for the banana, I had to use a long stick and stick it from the middle through the cuts and into the remaining of the banana.

Here are the images I produced:

For educational purposes, I will go through my process of photoshoping the image. 

So the first step was to bring it in photoshop. I didn't had to use any color correction techniques because I had already set my white balance to the correct temperature when I was taking the shot. 

So I started by using clone stamp tool and and the spot healing brush tool to take any pieces of toothpick out of the image.

 

 Before cloning it out

After cloning it out

 Then I used the hue and saturation filter to take out the yellowness of the apple because it had been out for so long and the 1000 watts hot lights made the rotting process faster. Go to the hue and saturation, into the yellow filter and turn down the saturation.

After edit of yellow hue, it already started looking really nice. 

I used the vibrance filter to bring out the colors in the image. It was ok to bring out the vibrance a whole bunch because there were a lot of dark colors surrounding the apple. 

After I used duplicate merged the layer so all the effects on the image are transfered to a new layer merged with the image(Mac: cmd+opt+shift+e)(PC: control+alt+shift+e). Then I used the HighPass filter at 1.6 pixels just so that we can bring back the tiny details.Dont worry if the screen goes into a weird gray scale color because we will be turning the channel into an overlay

 

Here is the screen shot of all my layers.  

So here it is, the final two images:

These images can be used for Commercial ads with just a little bit of text added to them.

Thanks for joining me, see you next time!