Within the scope of the People and Portraits portfolio I had a vision to take some images in front of some graffiti. This was aimed at adding a mass of colour to contrast with the commercial images.  This was following the works of Mark Tierney, who uses graffiti to great effect.

Taking the original image, the first step was to crop the images to A3 size and to save it as 300 dpi.

I then took a background copy to save the original. Looking at the image I just checked the levels to make sure that there was sufficient balance within the image. It did semi a little dark, so using the white dropper, I took a sample form the white area and lightened the image itself.

The location was actually under a bridge and the overall light was limited, producing dark images. Consequently, I used by reflector to throw some light into the image, which is why the light is being projected upwards within the image. However, this created a very interesting dimension.

The image did look a little pale, so I added a little more redness to the image using a hue/saturation layer and increasing the saturation for the red colour only.

Even after this, the background did not add a lot of additional value to the image so, once more, I was curious to see how it would look in black and white. Therefore, I took the colour out of the image by adding a Hue/Saturation layer and reducing the saturation.

This left me with an interesting image, with the use of the light creating an extra level of interest within the overall picture. This has allowed the model to stand out from the surrounding background and has exaggerated the features of her face.