Exercise: Selective processing and prominence.

Outline: Select an image that you have previously taken which the main issue is the visual prominence of a figure in a setting. Use digital processing methods to make two new versions of your image;

• make the figure less prominent
• and make the figure more prominent

I selected this autumn image for this exercise as it's already rather difficult to see the figure among the surroundings. I was interested to see what I could do with it to make the figure more prominent and also to see if it was possible to make it any less noticeable.

original

To attempt to make the figure more or less prominent, I played about on photoshop elements 9 with the different features and found the best outcome was using a selection of features.

making the figure more prominent

To achieve the above result, I have increased the brightness, lowered the contrast and increased the saturation. This has brightened the entire image, making the sky area overexposed but shows the figure nice and bright among the surroundings.

make figure less prominent?

To attempt to make the figure less prominent, I increased both the brightness and the contrast to make the background lighter but to also make the shadows darker and therefore submerge the figure more into shadow. 

Conclusion: This was a very interesting exercise to undertake. It's good to work out how to make the figures more or less noticeable within and image just by adjusting the image as a whole, without selecting just the figure and adjusting the small section. I am happy with the first image but as the figure didn't really stand out in the original, I'm not sure the second image had made the figure any less noticeable than it already was, but it has improved the overall image with the figure pretty much the same.