Assignment 1 - Image 1: Macro Golf Ball

The first image I decided to use in the final choice was a macro shot of a Golf Ball this was because there was a number of images on BigStockPhoto which were selling well and located in the 'Popular' section of the website and these were of golf balls and golf related images,

With this in mind I looked at some of the examples:

• Example 1
• Example 2

and from this thought I would do a similar sort of image, but to show a different shot of the golf ball, so I set up a scene for my image and turned on the Macro mode on my camera and took some test shots,

From this I picked out the best of them so that I could edit it in Photoshop, the best image I took was the one shown below:

Technical Details:

• 8MP - 3264 x 2448 (Pixels)
• ISO - 64
• Flash - Natural Light Only
• Time Taken - Afternoon, Dull Sky (Some Sun)
  

This image was quite dull and the colour was quite low due to the time of day the image was taken and the quality of the grass with which it was taken on, to enhance these I opened the image up in Photoshop so I could alter certain parts of the image,

Alteration 1 - Levels

I added a very slight altertation to the Levels of the image to make it slightly lighter than the original image




Alteration 2 - Touchups

I added a few touchups to the image, these got rid of things such as specs of dirt on the camera lens or on the golf ball, below is a before and after image of a spec of dirt on the golf ball after using the Clone tool in Photoshop to get rid of it:



After:



Alteration 3 - Color Balance

This alteration was the one that made the most difference, it really made the colour in the grass stand out making it a more vibrant green instead of a dull green the process images are shown below:



Final Image:


After I had finished altering the Image in Photoshop I saved it as two seperate files:

• PSD - This is the file format for Photoshop this makes sure that the layers used are not flattened and can be returned to and changed if they are needed to.
• PNG - I used this file format for the final image because it is not classed as a 'lossy' file type, whereas JPEG compresses the image size down therefore losing quality and pixel ratio, PNG keeps the quality of the image which then gives a better end result.