Week 2 Journal

This week we are supposed to upload 5 color-corrected images we are using for our first Photoshop project. I thought I had copied those images to my jump drive, but it turns out I didn't. I'm going to do what I think is the next best thing and upload the Photoshop project along with the non-color-corrected images I used and point them out.

Here's my Photoshop project so far.

You can see that the color scheme is kind of a soft, neutral, tan/orange.

This is the piece of marble decoration on the left side of the project image. This is a picture I took back in 2011 when I went to Rome. I have always liked the whole late Antiquity architecture, so I really wanted to use this in my image. However, it looks really out of place in my image, probably due to the conflicting light sources. I will take this out and try something else.

The sky and 'sun' actually come from this picture of a halved lemon. I noticed that I was going pretty literal for most of my image's elements (picture of a shrub to use as a shrub, ocean to use as an ocean, etc.) so I thought I'd try the lemon. I like it, but I need to darken the color of the sky lemon at the edges of the image. Otherwise it looks a little out of place. 

Here's the ocean I used in my image. This is from my extremely recent trip to Laguna Beach, CA, where my dad got re-married. I've always loved the ocean (which sucks because I live in Kansas) and I really wanted to put water into my image. I did have to spot-heal the people off of the beach, and I used some other rock textures to cover up the cacti. Not a fan of cacti.

The shrubs on either side of the image come from this one plant. I need to take one of the shrubs out because it looks a little obvious to me that I just copied and pasted the same plant. I'm not particularly happy with the angle of the sun here, so maybe I need to scrap this shrub altogether. This is from Coronado Heights a few miles out from my hometown.

Back to the ocean. This is a little tide pool full of sea anemones at Laguna Beach. Obviously I flipped the image. However, I left the small wave crest, and I've decided I need to take that out. It doesn't make physical sense if the ocean is farther down hill.

My general picture strategy was to find elements I liked and pray they would work. In that I neglected the light source angle and how that would affect shadow, and it has made me a little unhappy with how things are working out. I've taken more photos since these and I definitely paid more attention to light angle.