Black & White Stills Practise: Ladsies

Image:

Actor/model thing: Lukey

Original image:

As you can see it was really very dark.

Here it is greyscaled without any further editing:

So I cheated and used Paint Shop Pro's 'One step photofix'.

After 'photofix':

I think I might have removed some more noise as well at this point.

If we greyscaled it now it would look like this:

I thought it might be able to cope with a bit more contrast:

More contrast: Also I thought it looked quite cool in high-ish contrast colour:

I shall relate this to the main idea in a minute or so.

Practicing Black & White Stills: Girlies

Today I took some shots of Saxon (who was nearby at the time) and some of Luke so I could fiddle around with contrast and effects on Photoshop, partially just to practise using Photoshop as thusfar I have only used Jasc's Paint Shop Pro 7 & 9. It was also intended to investigate how to create the black and white filmic effect crucial to create the film noir aesthetic.

Edited shot:

Original shot:

What I did: I cropped the image, airbrushed it a wee bit, used the 'despeckle' tool (in order to remove some of the noise that I found showed up more once the contrast had been upped), and then I increased the contrast and brightness and then greyscaled the image. I also added a gaussian blur effect but cannot remember when I did this.

What I think about the end result: While possibly a bit striking the image is far too... grainy? Basically its very blotchy and not at all like the smooth, flawless images of the films we are trying to imitate.

What I think went wrong: There is probably something technical that would help this or that I should have used, but I think the main problem lies in the poor lighting of the original image. I think it needs to be brighter, less diffuse light (this shot was only taken by a window on an overcast afternoon).

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Later today I took some shots of Cat, seeing as she's the actual femme fatale.

Here is one of the original shots:

First attempt at editing:

What I did: I removed some of the noise to try and make it look 'smoother', upped the contrast and greyscaled it.

What I think: I think it's better than the last attempt as Cat was standing closer to the window. I think it looks a little bit strange in the way that the shadow falling over half of her face is in almost an exact half and half line, but maybe that's just because the light was still quite diffuse?

Test Shoot

July 17th
As a group decision, we are going to be test-shooting some performance shots of James lip-synching to the song 'Gold' in the drama block [more information of this is posted on the group blog].

I just wanted to post some ideas here instead of the group blog at first, to build up some ideas to help the trial-shoot go to plan, as I will not have confered with the group on these ideas probably until tomorrow.

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July 20th
The whole group (me, cat, james & luke) spent Friday lunchtime (18th) doing the test shoot in the drama block for performance shots of james.

I think this went really well, not just in the end result but I think we all as a group had a renewed sense of enthusiasm for the project.