Muriphobia - Waking up with Ratsby
BigDaddyComment by eschelar: hey guy, I was doing a school project and was browsing pics of rats. I saw this one and thought I might have a bit of a quick go at it.
Incidentally, virtually none of this is legal in basic... that doesn't really matter since the pic has been entered and pulled a vote.
#1 - composition... I used the crop tool to slice out the top part of the face (for mood) and bring the eye's attention away from the face to the eye to the hand and lantern. Note that the lantern is using the rule of thirds, but the hand is not. It is secondary to the lantern and serves to move the eye left rather than being a specific subject. I also pushed the pic a bit wider which gave me nasty black edges that did nothing for the picture other than change the ratios a bit... I could have tried to match the grey of the shadows, but I went a different way by using a separate layer and filling it with my brush, using a mask to erase it. My purpose there was to amplify the mood generated by the lantern... If I were following basic editing rules, I'd probably have thrown a fairly thick black border maybe with a thin highlight border to accent the rat's eye. I would have used a minor rotate to bring the edge of the yellow blanket in line with the bottom and crop it off.
#2 - the pic already has virtually no other tones than red and yellow and precious little of those colors too, so the result is going to be both grainy and rather lopsided for colors. I took this as an advantage and chose to work specifically on the red and yellow colors. I could have made it look a bit better by mucking about with some tricks of hue-shifting and other labor intensive stuff, but I wasn't interested...
I desaturated everything in two layers via hue/saturation, one layer for reds, one layer for yellows (legal in basic) and masked the heck out of it. I could have gotten close by using the curves on specific color channels and selective colors as well.
I then added a hue/saturation layer for hue shifting to warm up the quality of the heavily deflated reds and tweak the yellows a bit.
Since the photo is so dark in most areas, it's a bit fiddly to work with the contrast, so it's virtually pointless to go at this with brightness/contrast. I used two curves layers. You could do something pretty similar with levels, but you'd probably need to do more than just adjust your black point. Either way, this all amplifies the noise and grain too.
Since the pic was themed for fear/phobia, I made some choices that I might not have made for a different theme, but what I came up with was
this.
Hope it helps. It's not a quality edit, just a little something I fiddled with for a couple of minutes so I could use it in my spanish test for two seconds. But I thought I would share the process so you could see how the tools affect an image.
Message edited by author 2008-01-09 07:57:27. 
