Digital Hoaxes

With the next images I was experimenting with using Photoshop to exaggerate the original photographs or to portray them as something they are not.



When taking this photograph of my brother driving his motorbike I moved the camera in time with his bike in order to capture his figure and the bike in focus and show the movement by having the road and bushes blurred. Digitally I then enhanced this by selecting him on the bike as a separate layer. On the base layer I applied a movement blur and lined it with the direction of movement of the bike. I then applied a small black gradient to each side of the photo to draw focus towards the figure. I also enhanced the colours and saturation. In order for the bike not to look too unrealistic I selected the parameter of the bike and figure and used a Gaussian blue in order to get the layer to blend more easily and believably into the background.


This tutorial is from one of the photography magazines that I have been reading. In detail it tells you how to create a crop circle effect on a photo of a field. Instead of using the images provided to follow this tutorial I decided to use a photograph I had taken of a rapeseed field.
This is my final image, it took me about and hour and half to produce this and follow the complicated tutorial. I don’t think it works as well as the example because I chose to use a yellow field as opposed to dark green. This tutorial highlights the fact that hoaxing anything from aliens to perfect skin is becoming increasingly easy to do and increasingly hard to tell apart from the real thing.



This photograph is two stills from an advert from dove's campaign for real beauty. The film shows a sped up sequence of a woman being made up and then digitally enhanced. The final image is hugely different from how the woman originally looked. Here dove is trying to highlight what it sees to be a negative practice, which is all too prevalent in modern media.


This photograph of Kate Winslet has been heavily manipulated to make an ordinarily curvy Winslet look very skinny. On the release of this magazine Kate was outraged to see the finished result of the shoot that presented an untrue depiction of herself.The photograph on the far right is of Keira Knightly, before and after the image has been manipulated. In the final image Knightly's breasts have been made bigger and the features of her face have been altered.

Researching on this topic I came a across this article which clearly outlines this issue using a number of further examples.

http://www.oxfordstudent.com/tt2004wk6/Features/don't_touch_me_up



I took this low-key lit photograph in one of our studio lighting workshops. As well as de-saturating the image and adding a screen layer with a Gaussian blur, I also tried "air brushing" the subjects face. To do this I repeatedly selected parts of her face and "feathered" the selection, I then added a small Gaussian blur to the selection, this helps to smooth the area and conceal skin imperfections. On the left is a close up of the image after I have attempted "air brushing" and on the right is before. The effect is subtle and unfortunately hard to notice in this small image.

I used the same editing techniques for these two images also used in my studio project.

Smoothing the subject’s skin and erasing imperfections is a regular digital postproduction technique used by fashion and beauty magazines.