Digital Diversity

One problem you can encounter in photography is lack of dynamic range. The dynamic range is the range of light levels that can be seen from black to white. You will often find that while a photo has well exposed shadows and mid-tones, the light parts of the image are far to light or even blown out (pure white). On the other hand you may have exposed for the highlights in which case the shadows will look overly dark and underexposed. The problem this leaves is that what you see with your eye is certainly not what you get using your camera. The solution here is to take multiple exposures and blend them together to increase the dynamic range of the shot. You can use as many shots as you like but for the purposes of this tutorial it will be done using 3 shots.

There are 2 ways to get the multiple exposures. The first is exposure bracketing. This is when you set your camera up to take multiple shots of the same scene at different exposures. How you would do this depends on your camera. Many DSLRs and also advanced point and shoots have an option for this to be done automatically. You just hold the button down and the camera will take 3 shots, each time adjusting the exposure. You can normally set how much to do this by. If you set it to +/- 1 then it will take 3 shots, one at the original exposure, one a 1 stop above this and one at 1 stop below.

If your camera does not have this option then you will need to use a manual or semi manual mode to do this. For example you can use aperture priority, take the shot then use the exposure compensation to create the other 2 shots needed.
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1. This tutorial will go through the making of my image “Too much TV”. I named this image after the old wives tale that watching to much TV will turn your eyes square.

This tutorial can be done in both Photoshop Creative sweat (CS) and Photoshop Elements

It will cover colour correcting the image, reshaping the eyes with the Liquify tool and adjusting the light on the subject With adjustment layers and textures.

You will want to already know how to do the following:

• Layers and Masks
• Cloning
• Adjustment layers (related tutorials here and here)
•  Layer blend modes

Finding an image to create this from was fairly tricky. There are plenty of images out there of people staring at the camera with eyes wide open but that wasn’t enough for the idea I had in my head. I needed a subject that not only was staring but had an almost transfixed expression on their face.

I searched several free stock sites to find the image and did eventually get exactly what I was after.

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Seeing as I haven’t really had the chance to go anywhere of particular interest as of late I started to get stuck into some digital art again. It has been a while since I have done much due to my photography addiction. I almost forgot just how much I actually enjoy doing it, so I’m glad I did.

As I was browsing through some stock images I remembered an idea I wanted to create for a while now. I wanted to give the impression of someone being sucked into the digital world. How this could be done, I’m sure there are many ways, but my idea was to have someone being digitised into pixels (hence the title of the piece).

This tutorial will go through the steps I took to create the image.

Get Digitised

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